Edie pushes the soil back around the violets. As she kneels by Francis’s cross, it is so hard to believe that this is him, that it has all come down to this, but she knows that he is here. Finally she believes it. Finally she feels it. She puts her hand to the wood of his cross so that she may know its texture. It is not that she means this to be her remembrance of him, only that she means not to forget. She sits back on her heels and looks at him, all ringed around with violets.

When they had first told her that Francis would be disinterred, she had not liked the idea that he must be dug up and disturbed all over again. But having been to this place, having seen this poisoned, leafless forest, so terribly marked by the passage of war still, and so far off from being made right, she realizes it is better that than this. She wonders if this place will ever be made right.

How very difficult it has been to have to choose an epitaph for Francis, to be asked to summarize all that he was and all that his absence means. In the end, they have decided it together. Somehow, as she and Harry have talked over the past four months, as they have fit together all of the pieces, she feels that she has made her peace with Francis. She has talked to his memory through the long winter nights, has rewound from that man in the photograph, and has decided to remember him as the boy who sat waiting for her on the library steps. It feels as if they have shaken hands at that, she and Francis, because that, not this, is who Francis Blythe really was. She doesn’t want a photograph of this grave. This is not what she intends to remember.

“Your hands.”

She looks down at her hands, all creased in the earth of his grave. The grit of it is down her fingernails and behind her wedding ring. It is terrible to think what this earth contains, but she also feels strangely close to Francis just now and there is some comfort in that.

“It’s all right. Don’t worry.”

When she looks up at Harry she sees the concern in his eyes. She still sees Francis in Harry’s face, and she is glad of that, but there is also something else there now; when she looks at Harry’s face, she sees a future. Her legs feel unsteady as she stands up. He puts his arm around her and she leans into his chest.