“No, we never saw it. We never made it in. Today was the first time that I set foot there. We shifted up to Arras at the start of September.”

Cassie turns the page. “Some places are strangely beautiful in their ruination. Some aren’t. So you never came back to this area after 1916?”

“We moved south in the spring and took over the French lines.” He sees glimpses of flooded trenches as she turns, and then boot prints in snow. “March 1917. The Germans had just withdrawn and we were pushing forward. It was quite surreal suddenly to be walking across the enemy lines.”

There are photographs of empty enemy trenches, blown bridges, and just-vacated billets. Harry remembers walking into the room that Cassie is looking at in a photograph. There were letters on the floor and a glass by the side of the bed. He had almost expected the sheets to still be warm.

“I was just a little farther north,” says Ralph, looking thoughtful, with a corkscrew in his hand. He pulls the cork from another bottle and pours the wine. He fills Cassie’s glass right to the top, so that she has to bend to the table and carefully apply her lips to the rim.

“Bloody man,” she says.

Ralph stares into his glass and says, “Péronne. We seem to have been near-neighbors for many months.”

Cassie is quickly turning through pages. “The people have all gone.”

“It was quite eerie. We expected them to be hiding around every corner—and for there to be booby traps everywhere.”

“Not just that. Not just the enemy, I mean. You’ve all gone too. I haven’t seen a face for five pages. It’s just objects and landscapes now. He doesn’t take photographs of people any longer.”

He watches as she turns. She’s right. He hasn’t seen it before. It suddenly strikes him that he had also never taken Francis’s photograph again.

“I’d worry for the photographer,” says Cassie. “For his state of mind. I know that it’s hindsight, and maybe I’m reading too much into his choice of subjects, but looking at these pages I feel that this story isn’t going to have a happy ending.” She stops and shrugs her theory off. “Oh, no. I’m corrected. Here we go again. Who’s the pretty girl?”

There is a photograph of Edie on the next-to-last page of the album. Francis took it on his final leave. She is standing in the doorframe and looking like she doesn’t want to have her photograph taken.

“That’s Edie.”

“She doesn’t look very happy,” says Cassie, peering closely at the photograph.

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“And the men on the last page?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I’m writing in the locations for Edie, but I don’t know where that is.”