SHE HADN’T EXPECTED IT TO BE HIM AT THE DOOR. ALTHOUGH MORE than a year had passed, maybe because of that, Edie still wasn’t ready for him to be there. And, as she looked at the expression on Harry’s face, she could see that he wasn’t really ready either. As they stood there in the doorway, wordlessly taking in one another’s faces, her mind went back through his last letter, back through all those enveloped words to the winter of 1918. Had their silence really stretched for so long? Why had he chosen to break it now?

“It was an impulse thing,” he said, as she stepped back and watched his feet crossing the threshold. “I saw a girl with red hair.” He paused. “She was walking down Euston Road, and then went into King’s Cross station, and I suddenly realized that I was following her. Of course it wasn’t you, but for a moment it might have been. And I thought then, as I stood in the station and looked up at the departures board, that it was time I came back. You don’t mind that I’m here, do you?”

She shook her head. “You shouldn’t follow strange women. That sort of thing will get you into trouble.”

It was a relief when at last he smiled.

“It’s very odd to be standing here and looking at you again.”

“Isn’t it?” she said.

THEY WERE LINED up on the mantelpiece, Margaret Blythe’s soldier sons: three in a row, with potted hyacinths in between them. Edie stood behind Harry and watched his face in the mirror as he looked at the framed photographs of his brothers. Francis’s image was still draped in black ribbons. Somehow, although this was Harry’s house now, she hadn’t quite ever expected him to be standing here and seeing that.

“I remember that day,” he said. “We went to a photographic studio in Morecambe. We decided to have it done proper since we were finally in uniform.”

“I remember them coming in the post and your mother going out to buy the frames.”

All three brothers were making the same pose, a plaster balustrade to their left and a backdrop that was painted ferns and soft green shadows, like some sort of Victorian fairy glen. Edie lived with these images every day, these three smiling, long-ago khaki boys, but realized, as Harry turned Francis’s photograph to the light, that she hadn’t actually looked at them closely for a long time.

“I’d forgotten about it. I’d forgotten these photographs existed.” He turned toward her. “You know, it feels like a long time since I last looked them in the eye. Were the ribbons my mother’s too?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so decisive. So absolute.”