[Cardiff, Wales - 11:14AM 28/02/1919]
Then again, all that hesitation disappeared the second I saw her.
In all my useless contemplation, I hadn't even noticed her leave the house.
One moment the light still burnt behind the curtains, and the next she was there, crossing the street with that same purposeful stride I remembered, skirts catching the evening breeze, one hand tight around the edge of her coat.
She stopped only a few feet from me.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Her eyes found mine, and the world seemed to narrow to that single fragile thread between us.
The street, the distant trams, the murmur of Cardiff beyond the houses, all of it fell away like mist burnt off by morning light.
There was only the space between us.
Only the five long years.
Only the unbearable fact that she was real.
The seconds stretched until they felt less like time and more like something suspended outside of it, as though the whole city had drawn a breath and forgotten to let it out. In her gaze I saw every version of us that had existed at once: the boy who had left with mud on his boots and promises on his lips, the girl who had stood in shadowed doorways to steal moments that belonged to no one but us, and the strangers the war had made in our place.
She looked like she hadn't changed at all.
Still fierce.
Still impossible to lie to.
Still the same eyes that had once looked at me in secret beneath the gaslight and told me she was not afraid of what anyone thought.
My throat tightened.
I had spent two years building speeches in my head.
Explanations.
Apologies.
Every one of them vanished the moment I stood before her.
Her gaze dropped.
Not away.
Down.
To the cane. Everyone always locked onto it. To the way I leaned on it without thinking.
But then she looked straight back up at me. I saw the exact moment she understood that whatever ghost had returned to Cardiff, it was not the boy who had marched away in 1914.
Her breath caught.
One hand rose halfway, fingers curling against her mouth before she stopped herself.
"Teddy," she said.
My name in her voice nearly undid me. It was quiet, as though speaking too firmly might shatter the moment and send me back into the years between us.
"Kitty."
Even now, after all this time, saying her name felt like opening a locked room inside myself.
And out of it came emotions, dozens of them. Like little hands grasping and trying to drag me in every direction: frustration, grief, love, fear, guilt, anticipation, hesitation. They all tugged at me.
Her eyes shone in their hazel hue, reflecting the sunlight, and I could not tell if it was anger, tears, or some dangerous mixture of both.
Probably both.
I wanted to step forward.
I wanted to close the distance and let the world sort itself out later. But something held me still. Perhaps fear. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps the terrible knowledge that this next breath, this next word, might decide what became of everything we had once been.
Her chin lifted, that stubborn spark I remembered flashing across her face.
For one impossible moment, the light caught in her hair, and the brunette strands flowed like the finest chocolate.
The sound of the slap cracked through the air like a shot.
For half a heartbeat I didn't even understand what had happened.
Only the sharp sting across my cheek. The sudden turn of my head. The taste of copper where my teeth had caught the inside of my mouth. Kitty's hand trembled where it hung between us; she hadn't held anything back.
Her eyes were bright with tears, fury, and something far more dangerous than either.
"How dare you," she shouted.
The words were small, but they hit harder than the slap.
"How dare you stand there?"
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Because what was there to say to the years written across her face? To the grief I had put there simply by surviving too far away to prove it? Before I could even try, she moved.
Not away but into me.
Her hands caught at the front of my coat, fists knotting hard in the fabric as she drove herself against my chest with enough force to make me rock back on the cane.
I heard the soft gasp of someone watching from a nearby window. A curtain twitched across the street. Somewhere down the row, a door opened just enough for gossiping eyes to find the scene.
Kitty did not care, not even a little.
All the rules that should have stopped her; the propriety, the neighbours, her father's reputation, the hundred sharp tongues waiting to turn this into tomorrow's whispered scandal – fell away beneath the force of her grief.
Her forehead pressed against my chest.
Then the sobs came. Not graceful tears nor quiet weeping.
Real sobs.
The kind that tore themselves out of a person after being held back for far too long.
"You cruel, selfish man," she muttered into my coat between breaths, voice breaking apart. "You absolute idiot."
Each accusation was punctuated by another fistful of cloth twisting tighter as I saw her smiling slightly.
"You dreadful man. I thought you were dead."
I stood there. Just stood there. My cheek still burnt where she'd struck me, but that didn't really matter because I knew she was alright.
Her words came in fragments now, broken inhales.
"They said…"
a breath
"they told me…"
another
"You never wrote…"
a shaking inhale
"I waited…"
My hand twitched at my side. For a second I wasn't sure whether I had the right to touch her. Whether comfort offered now would be solace or insult considering everything I was going to tell her.
So I stayed still, letting her grief have its shape.
Her tears soaked through the wool of my coat, warm even in the chill of a Welsh February.
The street around us had become strangely hushed. I could feel eyes on us from windows and doorways, neighbours pretending not to stare while missing nothing. By tomorrow, half the street would have a version of this story.
By supper, her father might already know.
"Come on," I said into her ear. "Let's walk."
Kitty's fingers tightened once more into my coat.
Then, as if exhausted by the force of her own sorrow, she wrapped her arm around mine as we began to walk in silence.
Without a word, Kitty took my arm and led me away from the watching windows, north toward the river and the long, quiet stretches of green beyond, where the trees of Bute Park gathered and the city seemed to loosen its grip.
The further we walked, the softer Cardiff became.
Stone gave way to earth beneath our feet. The noise of the streets dulled into something distant and indistinct, until all that remained was the rustle of leaves, the occasional call of birds overhead, and the steady, uneven rhythm of my cane.
Tap. Step.
Tap. Step.
She didn't let go of my arm. Not once.
For a long while, neither of us spoke. Then, finally…
"Kitty," I said quietly. "I'm sorry."
She didn't look at me, but I felt her grip tighten slightly.
"I did write after I was captured," I went on. "Three times. Maybe more…I can't rightly remember. But when no answer came…" I swallowed. "I thought the worst. I thought perhaps you'd given in to your parents. Or that you'd moved on."
A pause.
"I thought I'd been left behind."
The words felt smaller spoken aloud.
"I was wrong," I said. "And I'm sorry."
We walked a few more steps in silence, then I let out a slow breath.
"But the truth is… we don't really know each other anymore, Kitty. In fact I doubt we ever really did."
That made her turn.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean…" I searched for the right words and found none that didn't feel clumsy. "Hell, I don't even know what it is you desire from life. And you don't know mine."
Her brow furrowed slightly.
"It's been five years," she said. "Of course things have changed."
"It's more than that."
She waited.
I stopped walking at a bench as we sat down. The trees around us shifted softly in the wind, their bare frames looming over us, their leaves long having all fallen.
"Have you ever had a dream," I said slowly, "one so real that when you wake, it feels like the world you've come back to is the false one?"
She studied me, uncertain now.
"I was hit by an artillery shell," I said. "You can probably guess that much."
Her eyes flicked, briefly, to the cane.
"It took my leg. Near enough took the rest of me with it."
I looked down at my hands.
"They told me later I should've died there. Truth is… I think I nearly did."
The memory pressed close…heat, noise, then nothing.
"And in those moments", I went on, voice quieter now, "when I thought I was going…I dreamt."
Kitty didn't interrupt.
"It wasn't like other dreams. It didn't fade. It didn't blur. It…" I struggled for the shape of it. "It lasted. Years. A whole life."
I let out a breath that trembled more than I liked.
"I grew up somewhere else. A Different people. A Different Time. I had a family. A wife. Children." My throat tightened. "I was happy, Kitty. Properly happy."
I rubbed a hand over my face.
"And then I woke up here."
Silence settled between us again, deeper this time.
"I don't know what it was," I admitted. "A dying man's mind grasping at something? A vision from God? Simple madness. Or…" I shook my head faintly. "Something else."
My hands curled slightly at my sides.
"But it felt real. It still does."
I looked at her then.
"I want to spend the rest of my life with you," I said plainly. "You are… you've always been…" I faltered, then pushed through it. "You're a wonderful person, and I am the luckiest man in Britain for you to love me back."
Her expression shifted; she smiled slightly.
"But what would you be choosing?" I continued. "You'd be tying yourself to a man who won't ever have your father's approval. Who can't go back to the docks? Who'll never be what he was meant to be."
The words came harder now.
"A man who can't even walk properly without a stick. "Who can't lift you or give you the sort of life you might've had."
I forced myself to hold her gaze.
"And worse than that… a man who, no matter how much he cares for you…no matter how much he tries…will always carry ghosts that feel as real as anything standing in front of him."
I swallowed.
"There's a part of me that still…misses them. That life. Those people." My voice dropped. "As if I might turn around and find them again if I just looked hard enough."
The admission sat between us, raw and exposed.
"I would never betray you," I said quietly. "I wouldn't even think of loving anyone else."
A pause.
"But I don't know if I can ever be…whole, the way I was."
The wind stirred the branches above us.
Kitty said nothing.
For a moment, just a moment. The silence stretched so long it felt like it might swallow the world entirely. What was it about the human mind that could turn a handful of seconds into something that felt like an entire epoch?
At last, she spoke.
"I don't know," she said. Her voice dropped into something smaller, almost childlike in its hurt.
"I buried you in my head a hundred times, and each night I would pray that none of this was happening, that we could go back to how things were. Before anything was expected of us…" she hesitated. "That isn't how the world works. We're here, and if you think any of this is going to stop me… We are going to figure this out, okay."
I felt a sudden sense of relief, not as if everything was alright. But just, okay… I had told her everything… well, except for the whole guilt about knowing the future and whether to use that knowledge, but that wasn't important right now.
(Author's Note: I've built up a backlog of about half a dozen chapters and are currently managing to write two to three a day at the moment so for the forseeable future expect at least one chapter daily.)