When she was nineteen years old she had left the calm of her childhood home for a house full of male voices. It wasn’t that she’d grown up in a quiet house; there had always been the homemade wine and the gramophone and the nonsense poems that they’d recited in comic voices. But it was just her and her mother: two twinned female voices, ever harmonious, never raised. They had been contented in one another’s company, stirring the jamming pan together, and sharing their sewing patterns and their books. And then her mother’s voice had been so suddenly silenced. She was no longer there when Edie looked up from her book; there was no one with whom to share the twist in the plot or a new blouse pattern. All of a sudden their busy kitchen was entirely still.

Francis had been so kind to her through those months of her mother’s illness; he had been so understanding, no longer the golden youth with the flashing grin and the ready rhymes, but instead a caring, gentle, steady man. He had let her talk when she needed to, and she had found comfort in the words that he returned. She could see how well he understood her, how he wanted to take away her sadness, and how she now hated the silence of her own newly empty home. And so she had left it for a house full of boys, with their jokes and their boisterous roughhousing, and the secrets that they always seemed to be sharing. She barely remembered her father’s presence, and so how odd it had been to suddenly live among the noise and the movement and the scent of these men.

The train lingers in a station that is all corrugated iron and pine planks, and she watches a young couple swinging their legs on a bench. The boy is turning through a book of maps, seemingly following the line of a route with his finger, but the girl pulls his hand away and smiles as she links his fingers through her own.

She hadn’t wanted a great fuss of a wedding because she had no family to invite. Even so, the little church had looked so unbalanced, with all the friends and relations on Francis’s side, and so few seats taken on the left. But then, having seen her glance back at the empty pews, his brothers had moved over; they had crossed the aisle, and so when she next looked back, there they were smiling on her side. “We’re your family now,” Harry had said to her afterward, “whether you want us or not, and we always will be.” She can still picture Francis in his bridegroom smartness, the shine of his slicked-back hair and the glow of his face, his sudden nervousness and the twitching smile that he seemed to be having difficulty controlling.