It wasn’t a possibility that he had previously considered. Harry had looked at the windows of the asylum ahead. Were they all looking out and waiting? Were eyes even now watching Rachel and wondering, considering, hoping for her recognition? Were eyes at this moment searching for familiarity in his own face?

“Did David make your locket?”

“Yes. He gave it to me on the day that we were married.” She had put her hand to her throat and smiled. “Forget Me Not. You see? And I won’t.”

“I don’t think he will have forgotten you, then.”

A door closes behind her and Harry sits in the corridor. He lifts his feet for the woman with the mop and watches her progress across the floor, the tiles glossed briefly to glistening black and white and then dulling and leaving only the smell of bleach behind. The metal mop bucket scrapes, someone coughs in a room off the corridor, and somewhere in the hospital a piano is playing. Harry pictures an audience of mute men, dulled men, dead-eyed lost men, and imagines his brother’s eyes blinking with the sudden recognition of a string of musical notes. Could it yet be? Should he have followed Rachel into the office? He photographs the shadows on the corridor, the doors on the corridor, the handles on the doors.

At length an officer emerges, ushering Rachel. He shakes her gloved hand and nods his head at Harry as he stands. “Nobody in England has any idea of the logistics of this thing. It will be years before it’s cleared up.” He has weak eyes, Harry notices. He rubs at the red marks on either side of his nose where his reading glasses evidently pinch. The smile that appears, when his hand pulls away from his face, is weary but sympathetic. “It is a dreadful mess,” he says.

“Isn’t it?” Harry replies.

They walk back toward the village down a straight road. To the left, a farmer is struggling with a plow. Harry has read about the iron harvest, the barbed wire and spent shells that block the plowshare’s path—and worse too. He watches the pointed toes of Rachel’s boots strike out. Her heels click sharply on the newly metaled road. Her mouth is a tense line.

“So, could they tell you anything useful?”

“Not really. He took all the details. I had to look through cards and pick out the color of David’s eyes and hair. I had to point to the nearest match for the shape of his nose and his mouth. It shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was.” She laughs oddly. “He said there are thousands that they haven’t identified, hundreds of men who have completely forgotten who they are. They’re photographing them, cataloguing them. That was the word he used. Can you imagine it? It made me think about butterflies in a collector’s cabinet.”