She could see, when she looked at Harry, that something wasn’t quite right. There were new shadows around his eyes and he looked like he wasn’t sleeping. Something trembled just occasionally around his mouth, like he wasn’t entirely in control. She saw how the cigarette in his hand shook. She felt such pity and tenderness toward this sad, damaged young man, whom she had known as a bright, ambitious boy, and who suddenly looked so very like Francis. She didn’t want Harry to be sad, but she hadn’t known what to do when she had seen those same flickers pass over Francis’s face, and she hardly knew what she might do now for Harry.

“Are you sleeping?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I’m not sure that I believe you. Are you eating?”

He smiled, pulled his eyes away from hers, and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m grateful for your concern.”

“Of course I’m concerned. You’ve lost weight. You look like you haven’t slept properly for weeks. I’d admit that I can smell whiskey on your breath, only you might tell me where to go.”

They had been such a unit, the three of them; they were a team, they were linked, their voices always joining and their wordless looks saying even more. They communicated with their eyes, these three brothers, and she wondered how Harry existed now without the sustenance of all that wordless language. She missed her mother’s voice and her understanding, but how much worse must it be for Harry to have had all that closeness taken away? She imagined that it must be something like deafness, or blindness, or losing a limb. As brothers they were such a fundamental and overlapping part of one another. How did he cope with that part of him gone? Perhaps, she thought, as he watched the match flame flutter between his fingers, Harry wasn’t coping?

“You have blue irises,” he said, nodding at the vase on the windowsill. “Francis used to buy you a bunch of irises every spring, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“It’s odd when I look around this room: everything is the same, and yet it’s all different.”

“It is.”

“You don’t have to keep things as they were, though, you know. This is your home now, and if you want to change anything, you must.”

“You mean the crows?”

The crows on the kitchen dresser watched them with beady eyes. She had always thought them too laughable to be menacing, with their cocked heads and glass button eyes, but she had noticed how Harry was repeatedly glancing at them now, and then looking away, as if he didn’t quite want to see them.

“I didn’t expect them to still be here. I’ve never pictured you in this room with the crows still in the background.”