“Quite well. Thank you.” She bites toast and he looks away from her mouth. She is wearing a high-necked black blouse today and jet earrings that swing as she chews. She gives the appearance of having dressed very deliberately this morning, as if she doesn’t mean for there to be any doubt. “I’m grateful to you for being here with me, Harry, but helping me doesn’t move her forwards, does it? It doesn’t get her any closer to the truth. I mean, it doesn’t work by proxy, does it?”

“No,” he says, considering what that truth might be and what Edie moving forward might mean. “Only I’m not quite sure how to help her. Will you write to me if you have any news?”

“Would you want to know?”

He watches her tidy fingers briskly cutting the toast into smaller triangles. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. I want you to find him. You’re here for the next fortnight?”

“I have a diary full of hospitals and cemetery records and meetings that will probably go nowhere.” She looks up from her teacup. “But where will you be? Where do I contact you?”

He considers and, at length, writes Edie’s address on the back of a spare postcard. There is an image of Arras Cathedral in ruins on the front. A Tommy in a tin hat is poking gloomily at the fallen stone with a stick.

“It’ll get to me there.”

“You should tell her,” says Rachel.

“I can’t,” he replies.

AT THE STATION he sees there is a train going to Béthune. The place-name brings back interbattalion cricket matches, sessions of practicing their bowling actions with Mills bombs, and the journey back out of the Richebourg trenches. They had moved back out to the rest area at the end of February 1916, marched, eight miles away from the war, back to where the snow glistened rosy and blue again and their boots once more crunched. Harry turns through the album as he waits for his train and sees himself and Will posing in the snow for Francis’s camera.

“Smile for the dickey bird!” Francis’s voice comes back across the years and miles.

As they marched west, there were garden gates and overblown cabbages. There were painted shutters and shops that sold postcards and chocolate. The lacquered shoots of the overhead branches, glossy with promise of new life, had a fresh beauty, Harry remembers. To no longer strain to listen, to take it as it came, was liberating, and civilian sounds beguiled Harry’s ears: a girl’s laughter, a baby’s cry, a dog’s bark. Domesticity looked bright and kind and he put all of its colors down on paper. Francis had photographed roadside shrines and oxcarts, staring children and the splitting seams of their boots. Will is laughing in a goatskin coat by a sign that says NO LOITERING.