“He’s the reason that you’re here, isn’t he? It’s really about him and her, isn’t it?”

“Only I fear he’s the one name on my list that I’m not going to be able to place. That I’ll never be able to place.”

“Ralph will help you. Let us help you.”

“Thank you.”

“And when it’s done, when it’s all crossed off, you’ll go home?”

Harry wonders where home is. He looks around this kitchen, which seems very much like a home. A tabby cat is circling the table legs. Cassie puts down milk in a saucer and the cat arches its back to her hand. He thinks of a kitchen full of crows and Edie in it. Could that ever be home again? Would they ever again sit either side of that table? Should there be another chair at that table? He wonders where she is now. He replays iterations of possibility in his mind, arranges Edie and graves and ghosts, but can’t see what exists beyond. “I’m not sure. It rather depends on how things go over here.”

“Number thirteen,” Cassie reflects. “Unlucky for some? I’d wish you good luck, although in this case I’m not sure what that happy outcome is.”

“Neither am I,” he replies.

THE VAN RATTLES along the newly made-up roads and Harry looks out at the strange hillocky land. The fact that the grass is growing over it makes this terrain seem all the stranger. It is like someone has taken a penknife to a Bruegel landscape. Will it ever be stitched together again and the scars smoothed over? Will time level and soften it? Here and there are piles of rusting debris and groups of crosses. He realizes, as he sees the metal roofs of the village ahead, that they have just driven over the rise that they were meant to have taken on the twentieth of July 1916.

“How do you live here?” he asks Ralph. “I’m not sure I could.”

“I couldn’t cope with being back in England. The awkward conversations. The comfortable upholstery. The ticking of the clock. My mother’s cooking!”

“No?” He looks across at Ralph, profiled against the afterward landscape and tries to picture him in English domesticity.

“But, more than that, the knowledge that all of this was still here.” Ralph pats the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. Harry hears him take a breath. “I mean, the job wasn’t finished, was it?”

He halts at the junction and they turn into the village. Harry looks out at the huts and the vegetable gardens. He sees a flutter of yellow wings within a wire birdcage. A woman is pegging out a line of white washing. A child chases a dog and stops to stare at the van.

“No, I don’t suppose so.”