With thanks to all of you reading and/or reviewing, especially over the chaos of holidays! A happy New Year from Scotland and a promise to write you happier chapters then!

'He was my brother too,' said Alastair as he and Di walked through the old wood. It had been her idea to get out of the house; he was clearly restless in the face of his sister's grief, which manifested in a dizzying whirl of activity, and Di, who had felt much the same and that not long ago, knew what a trial it was to have to contend with other people until you knew how to be around them again.

'And I can't –I mean if she won't –' he gave up in frustration and seized a protruding limb of a golden birch and jerked it live and green from the trunk of the tree. Then, extracting a penknife from some recess of his person began to whittle it.

'Alec,' he said carefully, 'could make her greet –could make her cry. I don't mean that quite the way it sounds, only –well maybe you'll have noticed –Mara stoppers things, bottles them.'

In fact Di had, largely because she did it too, and she made a faint noise of affirmation back in her throat, wary of interruption.

'Alec could unstopper them,' he said, a tendril of golden birch unravelling from the blade of the knife. 'Alec had the trick of it and I never thought to ask because…oh any of number of things really. We were rare lucky and shadows were few, that was one reason but mostly it was enough that Alec knew. Years and I didn't think I'd need the knowing of it, and now he's gone and I do, and I can't make her weep and that matters because it's one thing for a girl to greet –people die and that's sort of expected. It's not the same for boys –save they catch it off the lasses, that's different. Or perhaps its only home as is like that?' He looked wide-eyed at Di, eyes like drowned blue planets. Afraid to break his train of thought with speech, Di gave a small consolatory nod, that no, it had been no different in the Glen.

'And if she won't, said Alastair feelingly, 'and she won't because Mara never has been one for greeting – except could Alec make her, which he isn't here to do – then I can't either because it doesn't work like that.' He gave the switch an experimental twitch. It struck against a lilac bush and white petals gusted like rain to the ground. Finding it worked, he gave the switch another snap and the white blossoms of the lilac shredded like ribbons. Di put a cautious arm around his shoulders with difficulty; he was built like a cedar sapling, at once sturdy and hardly there at all, and his shoulders would keep twitching with the effort of casting the switch. The lilac bush was rapidly dissolving into streamers, the scent of the blossoms thick and cloying on the air.

'I think sometimes,' she said, with a thought for Walter, 'you do it because to cry is to confess the thing has happened, and once you do that it can't ever be taken back. When you cry over a death it becomes true, and for it to be true means that they're gone and you can't go after them –and it doesn't matter how sweet and good the promises of the hereafter are, they aren't now. Now though is almost always when you need them because when you're that close, close enough to see ghosts before the event or intuiting the meaning of a poem they've written, it's because they're an extension of you and you can't imagine living without them any more than you could living without a torso. You need a body to go on living, and you need them. And so you don't cry, or give in to the hurt of it, because then it's happened and there's no way back.'

'But then,' Alastair said reasonably, 'why not just say all of that?'

'It's easier to say when you've lived with it for a while,' said Di. 'I don't think, in the aftermath of a loss we're inclined to yield with grace to reason –is that what the poet says?'

'And bow and accept the end / of love or a season.' Alastair seemed to grin in spite of himself, the coruscation of the smile fleeting as a starburst. The breath of the lilacs was headier and muskier than ever and Di saw that he had run out of stalks to desiccate. The tree stood bowed, branches low and blooms in tatters, the white scintilla of them gusseting in a sussurrating whirlwind at their feet as the breeze caught them. As they stood watching them the shimmer of a smile vanished, and turning the switch between his fingers he said, 'But no one likes to do that –and if I can't take the sting out of it for her, then what do I do?'

'You stop trying to catch her, and let yourself be caught,' said Di. 'That way you'll be there when Mara does call on you. In the meantime though, you weep if you need to. I won't let on.'

'You've something in your hair,' said Nan, reaching across Di and extracting a white petal from her hair. 'What's it from, a trillium?'

'Lilac more likely,' said Di. She reached for it and brushed it under her nose, trying to catch the scent of it. Definitely lilac.

'They bloomed so early this year that I thought they'd all have wilted by now. I hadn't realised there were any left,' Nan said. Di, intently rootling among the contents of her night-table only shrugged.

'I expect there aren't now,' she said, surfacing with a worn envelope. Di felt the slight pressure on her shoulder and smelled apple-blossom as Nan bent over her shoulder to read the address.

'Is that…' Nan began, and then the weight on Di's shoulder and the smell of apple-blossom faded as Nan retreated to her side of the room. 'I never realised he wrote to you at the end.'

'I didn't want to read it then. I wanted some part of Walter to still be there, to be here. Alive. As long as I don't read it he is –was.' Carefully, and with suitable awe of ghosts, Di took the curve of her storkbill scissors to the sealant. It was stiff at first, then came away in a crackle and rustle of paper, and there was the blue paper Walter had favoured, his beautiful, right-sloping handwriting shimmering in the late-afternoon sunlight. The clatter of Nan's heels against the floor penetrated through the murk of this embalmed memory and Di resurfaced sufficiently to say, 'Don't you dare go away. If I'm going to fall to pieces, someone will have to reassemble them.'

'All right,' said Nan, and retraced her steps to perch on the edge of Di's bed, her body at right-hand angles with the lone star quilt. 'I'll be here.'

'In fact,' said Di, 'shall I read it to you? Even Walter's prose read like poetry, it seems a crime not to read it aloud.' She felt Nan's hand weave its way into her hair, where it curled like a kitten against the nape of her neck, the apple-blossom smell of her wrist tethering Di to her.

'If you like,' she said, her fingers unthreading the knots in Di's neck. 'But you mustn't feel obligated.'

'It's not an obligation,' Di assured her, and began to read.

There is a hunter's moon tonight. I don't mean those bleeding orange moons of October and harvest, but a crescent, Diana's arrow –your moon. I've been watching it ever since it rose, all poised and taut, and feeling you very near. Nearer than usual, I mean. Do you know, I've carried a piece of you with me all this last year? Nothing so tangible as a coil of hair or a handkerchief you embossed –though I expect somewhere I have got such a thing –but your voice all trimmed with fire and gold, and fluid as water. It's in the wind tonight, or else there's an echo of it deep in my bones that makes me wish you were here to embolden me. You always could, Diana.

You'll forgive me not calling you Doss this evening, won't you? It's not done in anger, only a great sense that time's wearing thin, and if it is an end unravelling in front of me, I want it to be your name at the corner of my mouth –your proper name and not the one I gave to you. Strange, isn't it, the power inherent in names? To use one is almost to enthral the other person, to contract one to make the bearer yours (mother always lengthened ours in exasperation, do you remember?). So you mustn't be Doss this evening because if anything happens –and I think it surely must –I don't want you to be always bound to me.

But what I was going to say before philosophy rushed in with all its meditation on names and their magic was a memory of Ingleside. It was back when I had toothache, do you remember? Susan had tried some poultice or other, and mother had recommended the pet cure-all of one Rachel Lynde, and Faith thought nothing would do but her old plush elephant to take the sting out of it. None of it worked, not the Lynde cure-all nor the Baker poultice, and dad was determined I should have the tooth out –only I wouldn't because I was afraid it would hurt. We went on like that for days, and at the height of it, I was lying in bed and I couldn't see, much less sleep, for the ache running through my jaw, you crept in like an eel and pinched me hard under the ear, do you remember? I was about to let out a wail like a banshee but before I could the hurt had passed.

'That's just what it would be like with the tooth,' you said as you wormed your way under my quilt. It was that old green Bear Tracks one vintage of Grandmother Blythe and I remember I thought your hair on it looked like a rope of wild tiger lilies. I didn't say so in case you pinched me again, but I do remember filing the thought away for a poem.

It wasn't long after that that I defended Faith from Dan Reese, and I remember saying that that was what decided me when I told dad about the tooth, and it's not that it wasn't so much as there was no way of saying that it was you pinching me that had convinced me that wouldn't land you in trouble and make me feel foolish.

We're going over the top the day after tomorrow, and so I'm wishing you here to pinch me again and tell me it will be no worse that –gone in the glimmering of an eye. I think I could go bravely to face any doom knowing that. Only it isn't my tooth aching this time, Diana-mine, it's my soul, and not only mine; its writ on the faces of the other men too, the soul-ache and heartsickness of the war. I shouldn't say it, but if I don't I worry I may never; we've seen ourselves too often in those other men and can't unsee it. I suppose the man I took a bayonet to not long ago was someone's Jem, or Jerry –or perhaps their Walter, do you think? Have I left some mirror to yourself unmoored, unanchored? These things weigh heavily tonight. I trouble you with them not to hurt you but because I find I must unburden myself to someone. Mother wants –do I mean needs? –to remember the good in the world, and Rilla needs me to be brave, but you could always read my heart, Diana and I'm so desperately wishing you here that I find nothing will ease me but to gift it inkily to you for safekeeping.

I've hardly taken a rose-glass to the future, but if I'm right and this is goodbye, I hate to think of you hollow and aching for me. I'm just selfish enough to worry that you might. It's funny, but at the last Rossetti –who you know I've never loved –is right after all; I'd far rather think of you laughing. Laugh then, and smile, and sing when you can manage it. But above all live –and gladly –for me.

The little room overlooking the Swallowgate garden was thick with feeling. Even the birds were silent. Clumsily, Di refolded Walter's parting letter and a sheet of paper, wafer thin and worn fell through her fingers. Still with one hand on Di's neck, Nan bent over and retrieved it from under the nightstand where it fluttered naked and exposed. She held it out to Di, but Di shook her head; she felt at once cripplingly fragile and bone-achingly tired.

'I can't read any more,' she managed, and the words felt sluggish against her soft palate. 'Would you?'

The hand on Di's neck tensed in hesitation. 'It's a poem,' she said, 'are you sure you wouldn't rather–'

'Please,' said Di heavily and laid her head on Nan's lap. Dimly she felt the expansion of Nan's ribs and the swell of her diaphragm, heard Nan's tremulous inhalation as she began.

I am coming the long way home,
Across the verge of memory,
The road of yester-year,
When the days were long and golden,
And the hours disappeared
In whirlwinds. Do you remember?

Long dappled grass and soaring skylarks mattered,
I think so did the trivial things;
You wore trilliums in you hair, and we chattered
Lying in the canopy of the trees, of dreams,
And rhymes and schemes and things we had no notion of,
But cherished even so.

I'd wish one last shared sunset,
The light of it lacing your hair with flame,
To cherish. But then I'd have to choose,
Unpick the weave of history and name a favourite.
There's too much gold between us, too much good
For that. Carry me close in the weave of your heart,
The pause between breaths, in the wing of a prayer –
Look to me then, and always, I'll be there.

'He wasn't angry,' said Di into the crease of Nan's skirt. 'If he wrote that, he wasn't angry.'

She could feel Nan's fingers through her hair, tracing the curve of her skull, calloused at the pads and tender in their ministrations.

'How could he have been angry?' said Nan, sweeping Di's tumbled hair from her eyes and away from her forehead. 'You were the twin of his soul –he always said so.'

'Knowing's –not –the –same –as –believing,' Di said. Still Nan's fingers combed through her hair, the scent of apple blossom lingering on them and weaving, so Di imagined into the strands of her hair. Something in Di turned over at the smell of it, because Walter had loved apples, had made himself sick on them once, and the memory of it, coming on the heels of his last poem, unstopped her. The dam she had so carefully built gave way at it's foundation and a year's worth of loss welled up in her heart as much as her eyes, and Di cried as she had not let herself cry since Walter had died, for the years they had had and would never have, for the hurts and prickles of life, and most of all for the closeness that even his poetry in all its skill could not measure and that nothing could ever give her back. She felt the loss of it as a great hollowing out of her chest through her eyes. And all the while Nan smoothed her hair and held her, the smell of apple blossom on her wrists, and sharp and sweet in Di's nose.

'He isn't coming back,' Di heard herself say afterwards, through the headache and the stuffed nose that stood testament to her tears. She had known it all this last year, but she hadn't yet said it, and the cost of the admission was a painful, soul-rending ache.

'I miss him and he isn't -won't ever come back.' She had run out of tears, but a stray sob rose up in her anyway, sticking painfully in her larynx. Nan slid down the bed then and onto the floor, engulfing her sister in a bear hug.

'Darling girl,' said Nan into her hair, 'he could never wholly leave you. Not ever.'

Di and Alastair are earlier quoting 'Reluctance' by Robert Frost.