It is a nice day for the time of year, the sky clear and blue, just a few wisps of clouds, the sea as gentle as it ever is. That's why you decided to come out on the water. You've been aching for it for weeks now, to spend just a little while on the boat. Later you will go to see Sorelli, but you haven't made up your mind yet whether to bring her flowers or chocolates. Or maybe a book instead. You would have to take a trip to the library, find her something she'd like. Maybe the book is better left until tomorrow, so she will have something to read and keep her occupied on Saturday when it will only be a short visit before you go to see Raoul.

Flowers, or chocolates? Maybe the chocolates this time. Pop one into her mouth and steal a kiss when it is still on her lips, and there is no one looking.

You cannot kiss her as much as you ache to, not when she is in that place. Any excuse to feel her lips against yours is a good one.

Chocolates it is then. You've already written her a letter this morning. It's still sitting on your writing desk at home. You'll bring that too, for her to read after you leave.

She'll have a fine collection of letters when she's well again.

You need to write a letter to Raoul, too. Not to tell him that you're coming to visit on Saturday, because you want that as a surprise, but to reply to the letter you received from him this morning. He is doing well, a bit bored of school but it's that time of year, and you'll tell him that the boat is in good working order (though there seems to be a creak or two coming from below deck, near the engine, so you'll put it in for an inspection after this), and you'll ask him if there's anything in particular he wants to do over Easter. You have nothing planned aside from sailing, and visiting Sorelli, and with any luck there'll be good news by then, and his time at home will coincide with her coming home too.

You live in hope, because it is the only way, and so you look forward, endlessly, to the day that you can take her dancing again.

It will come. You believe that, because you must believe that. There are no ifs, buts, or maybes.

Someday, she will be strong enough again that you can take her dancing.

You picture it as a quiet evening, late summer. There will be dinner, and then dancing. You will have dressed in the fine suit you were having tailored when you first learned of her illness, and that you will only wear for her. She will be wearing a new dress, one that you will buy for her, that will bring out the green hues in the depths of her eyes. Her gaze will pierce you like it did on the very first night, and your heart will falter, leave you breathless as you look at her, her dark hair elegantly curled and pinned, her hand light in yours. Neither of you will be in the mood for anything vigorous, but you will hold her close, and her arms will be wrapped around your neck as you sway, and she will be wearing the emerald earrings that you will buy her, and she'll smile up at you, and your heart will stutter and then and only then will you be able to believe that this is all behind you.

You dream, every night, of taking her dancing.

Your fiancée. Your Sorelli.

She was already in hospital when she accepted your proposal, and so you did not have it announced in the papers because it did not seem right, would feel like you were trying to advertise your attachment, or garner the sympathy for her condition for yourself. But when she is well, and if she agrees, you will have your portrait taken together, and then you will put it in the social and personals, but only if she wants you to.

It is eight months since you have held her properly. Eight months since you have kissed her properly. Eight months since you last woke to her lying warm beside you, her face pale and soft in the morning glow. You knew, already, that it would be the last time for some time. You knew, and it was only then, when she was asleep and would not see you, only then that you permitted yourself to cry.

You've never wanted her to be upset at the thought of how you've worried for her. But when she complained of the limp that would not go away—

Of course you knew then. How could you not? The x-ray was only a confirmation of what you were already dreading.

(Bone tuberculosis, the very words enough to chill your blood.)

Thank God Christine persuaded her to go for it. Thank God, because you do not think you could have found the words for your fear, not until they were already there.

You will take her dancing again. You will because you must. And anything that threatens to interfere with that is not something you will countenance.

You will take her dancing. And in a months' time when Raoul gets his holiday from school for Easter you will take him sailing. And as it stands one of those is more tangible than the other, but they are the twin things you have to look forward to.

Your fiancée, and your brother. How they both make you happy in their different ways.

And you will do everything in your power to make them happy, too. That is, at least, partly why you visit Sorelli every day. You know there are men who would not trouble themselves, and they would never deserve to find what you have found in her. And so you visit her every day, because you are a selfish man who cannot stand being away from her, and to keep her from slipping into despair, confined to that bed, with only the girls around her, equally-confined, to talk to.

(Visiting her every day, or twice, or three times, can never dispel the ache in your heart at leaving her in that place, but you hope that it makes things brighter for her.)

Wanting Raoul to be happy, too, is why you will have to talk to him about his prospects. You know he is hardly thinking of the future. You were not when you were his age. But age brings wisdom, so they say, and so does experience, and so you will have to talk to him of his future, and see what it is he is interested in doing. He has options, options that seemed very far away for you, in the middle of a war, when the things you were doing could have had you arrested (or worse), and you want to be sure he knows them.

There is, of course, the Navy. And if you squint you can see him in his uniform, Lieutenant Raoul de Chagny, and a captain, one day. Maybe a Vice-Admiral, at some distant point in the future, but you must not get ahead of yourself.

He loves sailing, and he is clever, and precise. It is not completely outside the realm of possibility.

Of course, he has an excellent head for books, Raoul. He's always been bookish, from the time he was small. You were teaching him to read before he ever started school, in English and in Irish. He might be wasted in the Navy, and so medicine might be a better idea. He has more than enough ability for study, and there are still your granduncle John's old medical books in the library. Likely they are very out of date, but Raoul (like you, when you were younger) has always enjoyed looking at the illustrations in them, the parts of anatomy in careful detail. He has never been bothered by blood. And there is that young medical student of your acquaintance, who you meet when you go to see Sorelli. Browne, his name is, Noël Browne. A Trinity man, though you're almost certain he's a Catholic. It's in your nature to admire anyone who disregards the diktats of the Archbishop of Dublin, and besides, he could be a good influence on your brother. You will sit down with him sometime and ask him about his studies, how he finds it and the practical experience. He might have some advice, that you can pass on to Raoul.

It will be Raoul's decision in the end, really, what he wants to do, not yours. You can only tell him what you think.

You'll ask him when you go to see him on Saturday, if there's anything in particular he'd like to do when he finishes school. Likely the question will catch him off guard but no matter. It's caught you off guard having to think of it.

God but it's hard to believe your baby brother will soon be considering a profession. You remember the day he was born, remember holding him in your arms for the first time, so tiny and new. Your father was still with the doctor, your mother slipped into the unconsciousness she'd never wake from, and Harriet the maid had gone for the priest, so you were left holding the baby, and you cupped his head to keep him safe, and he nuzzled into your chest, and the fear that lanced through your heart, at the thought that he would sicken and die like Maria and Lily before him—

A tear slipped and splashed onto his soft cheek, and it was all you could do to keep the rest at bay.

All of his life you have been frightened of something happening to Raoul.

All of his life he has proven that fear groundless, but it never goes away.

Sometimes, it is so very hard to believe he is sixteen, and is too dignified now to hurl himself into your arms when he sees you. You miss when he was small and you could scoop him up and spin him around to make him giggle.

In your shirt pocket you keep a photograph tucked of the two of you. Only a year old, but it is smooth with time beneath your fingers. You always like to have a photo when Raoul is not on the boat with you. It helps you feel a little closer to him, and you take it out and look at it and it doesn't feel as if he's all the way off in school, feels instead as if he might be below deck, studying the engine or practicing his knots. As if you could shout down and he would answer, come up grinning with his hair poking out at odd angles from under his hat. He wears it too short now for the curls to come into it, but they always make him look so much younger, like an over-stretched child, as if he is not most of the way to being a man.

You, too, are given to curls. It's why you go to so much trouble to keep your hair slicked down.

(Sorelli says she likes your curls. She is the only one you've let see them in years.)

It's getting near time, now, to turn the boat back to dock. The breeze is cold, between the bursts of warmth.

You will clean yourself up, and buy the chocolates, and go to see Sorelli. Tell her that you were out on the water. Tell her that you will bring her out, when she is well.

(Your wedding is such a long way away. But if there will be children, one day, you will teach them sailing, too.)

Christine might be there, visiting already. It's impossible to tell when she might or might not come. There's something going on there, about her appearances and disappearances, but you have yet to put your finger on what, exactly. And you do not like asking Sorelli, though you know she knows. The last time you asked a distant look came into her eyes, and she murmured something about Christine being "of a different time," so you decided then not to press the matter. It is enough to find out yourself, some day.

If Christine is there, and if she does not need to rush off as she so often does, you will invite her to tea. Maybe you will ask her about her comings and goings. Maybe she'll even tell you.

No matter. You like Christine. She makes Sorelli happy. And there is a quietness to her that makes you want to protect her. Something that reminds you of how Maria might have been, if she had gotten the chance to grow up.

It is only wishful of you, to see your sisters in Christine. But someone hurt her once, someone, somewhere. You do not have to ask her for to know that. And if you ever found out who it was—

Another creak from below deck. Tomorrow you'll see about getting someone to check things over. Tomorrow.

You draw the photograph from your shirt pocket, and smile down at it. Yourself and Raoul, last summer, on this very boat. Someone took it when you came back into dock. Harry Surdival, you think it was. He can't be much more than Raoul's age, and it was his cousin who sent you the photo, but young or not, he has an eye for capturing moments.

You'll have to choose a photo of Sorelli to carry with it. Maybe one of her dancing. She's a marvellous dancer. The best you've ever seen.

You don't just say that because you love her. The world knows it, too.

Another crack from below, louder than before. You frown and turn, half a mind to go down and check it now, but there is a roar in your ears and the water rushes to meet you, the photo slipping from your fingers, a searing pain above your eye—

The last conscious thought of Philippe de Chagny, must be the engine...

(The photograph picked from the water less than an hour later. A fisherman's callused hands. Smear of blood across the face of a laughing man, teenaged boy beside him grinning. That photograph, and eighty years from now, a girl with no fixed place in time will find it, in a charity shop beside battered books and an old hat. Faded and crusted with time, she will recognise the two faces, will know a man she met on the day of his death, will know his brother who became her dearest friend. And with trembling hands she will take it, and buy it, and keep it safe.)

(Keep it safe, until the day she takes it to a graveyard, and buries it beneath the gravel beside a headstone bearing the name Raoul de Chagny. Her husband will play his violin, and it will not feel like enough, but it will be all they can do.)

(I couldn't save him for you, she will think, but I can give you this.)