She walks toward the rear wall and the pattern adjusts itself into a mass of faces, of appeals, of searches. She touches her hand to a chair back to steady herself and then apologizes to the family at the table who all tilt their eyes upward to look at her. The wall is full of photographs of men, and around them the details of the people who are searching for them. So many faces. So many searches. How could so many men be misplaced? Could so many men really just have disappeared?

“Si vous voulez?”

She turns, and the waitress is standing at her side. There is a thumbtack in the palm of her outstretched hand.

“My brother is also disparu,” she says and gestures toward a tinted image of a boy in a blue uniform.

“Disparu?”

The girl hesitates for the word. “Missed? Missing?” There is a purple bow at the collar of her white blouse and she winds the ends of it around her fingers as she stares at the wall. Her hands look like they work hard, her fingers are red and her nails are short. She has a crease between her eyebrows as if she frowns a lot, but she brightens when she turns back to the tables. “There’s a chance, isn’t there?” she says.

Edie looks again at the photograph of Francis that came through the mail slot in her door three months ago. It is not enough just to pin it to a wall and hope that someone might chance upon it. She needs to do more than that: she needs to stand in that square, to know that he has been there, and to sense if he is still there yet. Simply pinning his face here will not answer these loud questions and, besides, she doesn’t want to leave the photograph behind.

In her handbag she carries a miniature portrait of Francis painted by Harry in 1914. As she unfolds it, she is struck again by just how different this face looks from the figure in the photograph. Here he is still the golden youth who whispered poetry to her in the library. This ink-and-watercolor boy could be the son of the man in the photograph. For just a second she checks herself again: Is it really Francis? Is that the man to whom she pledged her future? Is that the man who shared her bed?

She writes his name, together with her own, across the painting and fixes it to the wall. As she does so she is struck with the realization that she will miss this image. She had once meant it to be framed and hung on a wall and she can’t now remember why that never happened. It hurts to part with it. She will miss the kindness of Harry’s composition perhaps as much as she will miss this handsome once-upon-a-time man to whom she was married.