The crowd is finally doubling back and daring to look, to take in the new perspective of the square. They don’t get too close to the memorial, though; it is approved, but somehow at this moment it repulses; it is measured from afar, assessed and debated. Only Marie Leval is able to breach and bear that proximity. She leans against the railings and stretches a hand through the bars. It is too distant by design, but her fingers wriggle and reach, and must touch her son’s name on the plinth. The village watches aghast.

Gabriel’s hand is on Madeleine’s back as they walk into the bar. “En avant,” he says. Something has changed between them today, Harry sees. He wonders if she recognizes herself in the stone girl on the memorial and what Gabriel meant by it. He wonders if Edie has yet seen his envelope and understood its meaning. Marie-Thérèse nodded when he asked if he could take the photograph of Francis’s grave, but he had hesitated as he folded his letter around it. Did Edie really need to see it? But then perhaps for her, as for him, it will draw a line, silence the questions, and let her sleep. And he owed her this truth. Didn’t he?

THEY DANCE IN the bar that night. They sing songs from long before the war, and songs about the future, and the volume and the tears rise. Harry doesn’t feel part of it, he doesn’t know the words to any of these songs, but Gabriel tells him that he shouldn’t be alone tonight, and he knows that Gabriel wants him to be here.

It is hot in the bar, as they spin gavottes and waltzes and ragtime, singing of fidelity and anarchy, of old loves and barricades and cherry blossoms. Harry’s head pounds with the beat of the music, and the sounds of their laments and laughter, but he sits by the window and watches as the moonlight pulls the frost on the glass into patterns. Whorls of ice stretch finely, brightly, scrolling into rhythms of divine geometry. As the patterns on the glass multiply, he thinks about the cemetery with the gun emplacement at its center, the crosses of the nameless dead radiating out from it. He thinks about what that vast cemetery must look like in moonlight and what pattern the graves must make from above. Do the graves look like waves of shock radiating out? He pictures Francis’s cross and Francis on the cross with his arms splayed out. He feels the waves of shock that radiate from that image.

“Harry, are you all right?”

“Yes, but I might go home.”

“Stay. Drink. We shouldn’t dream tonight.” Gabriel’s face glistens in the strange yellow light of the bar. He reaches for the bottle and fills Harry’s glass right to the top, but Harry has no thirst for it tonight.