As newly married wife and husband, she and Francis had moved into his teenage bedroom, with his cricket bats and fossil collections and his maps of ancient military campaigns on the walls. They had lived like that for two months—his brothers’ voices always there through the walls, and laughing into the pillows to dampen the noise—before the house next door had come up for rent and they had moved one door down. It had seemed the most natural thing that they stay on the same street. She would never have taken him from his brothers, and why would they want to go any farther?

She had always liked to watch the three of them together—Francis, Harry, and Will—their secret sibling jokes and looks, and how their faces mirrored one another. When she sat across the table from them, it was like looking at a progression, or a picture of the passage of time. While Francis’s features were the most strongly defined—he was the most conventionally handsome of the three of them—Will’s face, beneath a mop of blond fringe, was still forming. When she looked from Will to Francis, she could see the man that he would be in ten years’ time. And she had assumed that they would always be there across the table from her, turning from boys into men, becoming the men they were meant to be.

The younger boy on the opposite seat catches her eye and she smiles as he looks away. That shy glance reminds her of Harry. She can see his eighteen-year-old features still, facing her across his mother’s dinner service, and how his eyes had sometimes caught hers, just like that. All of the elements that she had loved in Francis’s face—the curl of his eyelashes, the angularity of his profile, the bow of his top lip—were there in Harry’s face too. When she had seen Harry again this May, that resemblance had been all the more obvious.

Steam billows as the train passes under a bridge; they are into a cutting, and in the darkness of the earth bank she catches a glimmer of her own reflected face. Just as Francis had started with cameras in the summer before the war, forever insisting on taking her photograph, so it had been for Harry with his paints, and she always had to sit for her portrait. She can still put herself back in the sitting room, listening to the whisper of his pencil on paper, the chink of his brush against the glass, and her brother-in-law’s steady breathing.