It had been a couple of hours since Linda first saw her in the kitchen—alive, barefoot, chewing thoughtfully like the world had simply misfiled a day and put it back where it belonged.
A couple of hours since the sentence had been spoken upstairs and then kept echoing anyway, catching on doorframes and corners and the underside of every ordinary sound.
Now Skye lay in bed as if someone had set her down carefully and left her there, afraid to disturb whatever fragile thread was keeping her tethered. Not asleep properly. Not awake either. Just... paused in the aftermath. Her breathing kept trying to find a rhythm and failing—hitching, settling, hitching again—like her body didn’t trust the rules of being here yet.
Alice stayed beside her.
Not performing comfort. Not making a show of it. Just there, propped on one elbow, murmuring low nonsense that didn’t demand anything back. Stories without endings. Familiar words without meaning. A steady, unthreatening stream—something Skye could listen to without having to understand.
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Her hand moved in slow repetitions along Skye’s forearm, the way you soothed a child who startled easily. The motion never rushed. It didn’t insist. It simply repeated, again and again, like touch could teach a nervous system that it was allowed to exist.
Linda stood in the doorway and couldn’t make herself cross the threshold.
Not because she didn’t want to hold her. Because she did—so violently it hurt. But her body had learned, over five years, that if she reached for Skye she would close her hands on air. That reaching was a humiliation. That touching was a punishment.
And now Skye was here. Real. Warm. Crying in a way that didn’t fit the room. Confused. Devastated. Twelve. Linda kept thinking: she’s going to look up and see my face and that will be the thing that makes it worse.
Confusion—that was what wrecked Linda most.
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Not fear. Fear had a shape, a place to press your hands, a script you could follow. Confusion didn’t. It sat behind Skye’s eyes like a bruise on the inside. Skye would cry without warning and then stop just as suddenly, as if the emotion arrived without explanation and left the same way. Linda recognised it with a sick, clinical clarity: the crying of someone whose reality had slipped its tracks.
A couple of hours ago, just before her daughter walked through the front door,Linda had been certain she was done.
Certain enough to leave marks in a cupboard she hadn’t opened in years. Certain enough to make her hands remember steps she’d promised herself she would never rehearse again. Certain enough to write words she hadn’t allowed herself to reread.
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Now her daughter was alive and shaking with grief in her own bed, and Linda didn’t know how both things were allowed to exist in the same world.
A hand touched Linda’s shoulder.
She flinched before she saw him.
Simon stood close, his touch light but deliberate—neither comfort nor restraint. Just enough to say: I’m here. I’m seeing what you’re doing. I’m not letting you vanish into it.
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“Come downstairs,” he said quietly.
Linda hesitated, eyes fixed on Skye’s face. She forced herself to memorise the details like her life depended on it—the fall of Skye’s hair, the faint crease between her brows that meant she was fighting sleep, the way her fingers curled and unclenched like they were trying to hold onto something they couldn’t name.
Memory rearranged things when you weren’t looking. Linda didn’t trust it anymore.
Alice glanced up. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her expression was furious and exhausted at the same time, the anger fused to something raw underneath it.
“I’ve got her,” Alice said.
Not a question. Not reassurance for Linda.
A boundary.
Linda nodded because she didn’t trust her voice.
They left the door ajar.
Every step down the stairs felt like theft. Like leaving Skye unattended—even with Alice there—was a betrayal. Linda’s legs moved as if she was borrowing them from someone else.
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In the kitchen, the light was too bright. Everything looked obscenely ordinary: the table, the kettle, the washing-up that hadn’t been done because the world had cracked open in the middle of it.
Simon shut the kitchen door behind them.
The click landed like a verdict.
They stood on opposite sides of the table, as if distance could keep their lives from colliding.
Simon didn’t ease into it.
“Were you going to do it?”
The words were blunt enough to steal Linda’s breath.
She stared at the tabletop. Her mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
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Simon inhaled sharply, a sound caught halfway between anger and fear. He dragged a hand over his face as if he could wipe the night off his skin.
“I went into her room,” he said. “To see if she needs clothes. To see what... what we need to buy for Skye in the morning.” His voice caught on morning, like it was a concept too delicate to handle. “And I saw inside the cupboard.”
Linda’s stomach turned.
She closed her eyes, but the dark didn’t help. The dark was where the cupboard lived.
“I saw the rope, Linda,” Simon said, and now his voice was cracking. “I saw what you were about to do in there.”
Linda’s shoulders folded inward.
She couldn’t find words that weren’t either a lie or a confession.
Simon leaned forward over the table, palms flat like he was trying to hold himself in place.
“You do realise,” he said, quieter but worse for it, “that Skye would have found you.”
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The sentence was clean. Precise. Cruel in its simplicity.
Linda bent forward, elbows on the table, head dropping into her hands.
Shame burned hot and fast. Not theatrical. Not cleansing. Just a sickness crawling up the back of her throat.
“I didn’t,” she said finally. Barely sound. “I didn’t.”
Simon gave a broken laugh that didn’t contain humour. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
“I stepped down,” Linda whispered. “I stopped.”
“For today,” he said—not cruel, just honest. “Tonight. In that moment.”
Linda swallowed hard. “For Alice.”
Simon went still. The name landed differently in his face, like it hit somewhere he’d been trying not to look at.
He dragged a hand down his cheek. When he spoke again, his voice steadied—but there was something colder in it, something like frightened anger trying to behave.
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“Our daughter is alive,” he said, and he had to pause, like the sentence was physically difficult. “She’s alive, Linda. I still can’t say it without my head rejecting it. But it doesn’t erase what you nearly did. It doesn’t make it disappear.”
Linda’s hands trembled against the table.
“I don’t know what happens now,” she said, tears slipping free without permission. “I don’t know how we do this. I don’t know how to be her mum again when I thought that part of me was finished.”
Her voice broke on mum. The word felt like a limb she’d lost.
“But she’s here,” Linda said again, smaller. “She’s here.”
Simon reached into his jacket. Pulled something out. Folded paper.
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Linda knew it by the weight it had put in the house all day.
He didn’t dramaticise it. He didn’t hold it up like evidence. He slid it across the table with a careful flatness, as if the paper might cut.
“Thought you should have this,” he said. “As you don’t need it anymore.”
Her note.
Her goodbye.
Linda stared at it like it wasn’t hers, like it belonged to another woman—someone braver or crueller or more finished.
She picked it up with hands that didn’t feel like hers. For a second she wanted to tear it. Not because she regretted writing it—because she couldn’t bear that she’d meant it.
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“I didn’t want to die,” Linda said suddenly, and the truth shocked her with its clarity. “I wanted to be where Skye was. I thought maybe that was the same thing.”
Simon’ eyes filled. He looked away fast, like looking at Linda too long would make him fall apart.
“I know,” he said, voice rough. “I know.”
Linda swallowed. Her mouth tasted of salt and old fear.
“I’m angry at you,” Simon said, and the admission came out like he hated it. “Not because you’re broken. Not because you’ve... been living in grief. I’m angry because you were going to leave Alice holding it again.”
Linda flinched.
Simon’ voice trembled. “You think she’s made of steel because she’s loud. Because she swears. Because she looks you in the eye and tells you off. But she’s not. She’s been carrying you for years.”
Linda tried to speak.
No sound came.
A sharp sound cut through the room.
“Jesus Christ.”
Alice stood in the doorway.
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Her face was white with fury. Her hands shook openly now, not trying to hide it.
“I heard everything,” she said.
Her voice didn’t rise. That made it worse. Controlled rage was a blade.
“Alice—” Linda started.
“No,” Alice snapped. “Don’t.”
She stepped into the kitchen and stopped short of the table like she didn’t trust her body to be close to Linda without doing something she’d regret.
“You don’t think,” Alice said, and her tears finally spilled—hot, furious. “You just decide. And everyone else has to live with it.”
Linda’s throat closed.
Alice wiped at her face hard, like she resented the tears for showing up.
“Do you know why I stopped speaking to you?” Alice said, voice shaking.
Linda’s chest tightened. “Because I—”
“Because you were drinking yourself to death,” Alice said. Flat. Brutal. “And I couldn’t watch it anymore.”
Linda’s eyes burned. “Alice, I—”
“No, listen,” Alice said, stepping forward a fraction, then stopping herself again. “I was twenty-one and I was your caretaker. I was cleaning up bottles. I was checking the bin to see how many you’d gone through. I was—” Her voice broke. She swallowed hard. “I was listening for you moving at night so I could make sure you didn’t fall down the stairs. I was waking up and thinking, please don’t be dead today. Please don’t make me find you.”
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Linda’s breath caught like she’d been punched.
Alice’s jaw tightened, furious at herself for shaking.
“And now,” she said, eyes blazing, “Skye is back—and you were going to make her find you. In her room.”
Linda’s face crumpled. “I stopped.”
Alice laughed once, bitter and wrecked. “Do you hear yourself? Like that fixes it.”
Simon said softly, “Alice—”
Alice snapped her gaze to him. “No. Let her hear it.”
Then back to Linda, voice lower, more dangerous.
“You don’t get to make this her first memory of being back,” Alice said. “You don’t get to put that on her. She already asked if she was alone.” Her voice cracked. “And you were about to prove to her that she is.”
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Linda covered her mouth. A sound escaped anyway—small, ruined.
“When we figure out how Skye lives in this world,” Alice said, “I am going to protect her. Me and Jolie. I don’t care how. I don’t care what it costs. But you are not putting your death in her hands.”
“I wouldn’t,” Linda whispered.
“You already nearly did,” Alice said. “It doesn’t matter if you ‘chose not to’ at the last second. It matters that you were close enough.”
Linda’s fingers tightened around the folded letter.
Alice’s voice softened by a hair—not kindness, exactly, but something honest beneath the anger.
“I love you,” Alice said, and the sentence sounded like it hurt. “That’s why I’m furious. Because if you die, you leave me holding it again. And I can’t. I can’t do it twice.”
Linda’s eyes flooded. “I never blamed you,” she said, voice cracking. “Not for that night. Not for anything. I blamed me. I blamed me for making you a third parent.”
Alice’s lips trembled. She looked away, breathing hard.
“And now you’re choosing to be one,” Linda whispered. “For her.”
“That’s the difference,” Alice said, eyes bright and steady now. “I choose this. Five years ago, I didn’t get to. Five years ago I was a kid with a sister who begged me to walk her home and I didn’t.” Her voice broke. “And then I spent years watching you disappear and thinking: I ruined everything and I can’t even keep the people I have left.”
A small sob sounded through the ceiling, faint as a thread.
Skye.
All three of them went still.
Linda’s chest tightened so painfully she thought she might be sick.
Simon spoke first, voice low. “She’s hearing too much.”
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Alice swallowed, wiped her face again, and nodded once—sharp. “Then we stop making noise.”
Simon stepped forward. Not to comfort. To steer.
“She could stay with me,” he said quietly. “With Mia and Christina. Just for a bit. If we need... structure.”
Linda flinched at the idea like it was a second loss. “Please don’t take her away from me.”
Alice’s gaze softened in the smallest way. “I’m not taking her away,” she said. “I’m giving her stability. And I’m giving you time to become safe.”
Linda’s throat closed. “I am safe.”
Alice’s laugh came out harsh. “Mum—”
Linda’s voice cracked. “I stepped down. I stopped.”
Alice shook her head. “That’s not safety. That’s luck. That’s timing.”
Simon exhaled, exhausted. “We can decide arrangements tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight we get through the night. Quietly.”
Alice nodded. “Skye needs a constant.”
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Linda stared at her. “And you think that’s you.”
Alice held her gaze without blinking. “Yes.”
It wasn’t arrogance. It was commitment. The kind that came from fear.
Linda’s shoulders sagged. She looked down at the letter in her hands.
She stood, walked to the bin, and dropped it in.
Soft. Final enough.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I made you carry me.”
Alice’s expression wavered. Her anger didn’t vanish. It simply made space for grief.
“You don’t have to be perfect,” Alice said, voice rough. “You just have to be here.”
Simon’ voice softened. “All of us.”
Upstairs, another small sound from Skye—then silence.
Linda’s body moved before she decided. She turned toward the door.
Alice grabbed her wrist, not hard, just enough to steady her. “Not barging in,” she said. “She’s half asleep.”
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Linda nodded, tears slipping down her face. “I just want to see her.”
“You can,” Alice said, and the permission mattered. “We go quiet.”
They moved upstairs like they were walking through glass.
At Skye’s door, Alice slipped inside first and climbed onto the bed without hesitation, curling around Skye like a shield. Skye stirred, made a small sound, and settled again as Alice murmured something low into her hair.
Simon paused in the hall, looked once toward the room, then turned away. He went to the spare room and closed the door with a careful click.
Linda dragged a chair into Skye’s room and sat beside the bed.
She didn’t sleep.
Skye’s fingers reached, blind and weak, and found Linda’s sleeve.
A small clutch. Instinct. Need.
Linda froze, then leaned forward, careful not to jolt her. She let Skye hold the fabric like it was a rope back to the world.
Alive.
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The word still didn’t fit.
But Skye’s grip did.
And for tonight, that had to be enough.
⸻
Present Day
The tea steamed between Linda’s hands like it had somewhere better to be.
Jolie set the mug down carefully, fingers lingering on the rim until Linda’s grip steadied enough to take the weight. The cupboard door behind them was closed now. Not slammed. Not ceremonially shut. Just... closed. Reduced to wood and hinge again, not an accusation.
“You don’t have to talk,” Jolie said. Her voice stayed low, level. Professional without being distant. “You don’t have to explain anything. Just breathe.”
Linda tried.
The breath went in jagged, caught halfway, then escaped in a thin shudder that made her shoulders shake. She hated that—hated how obvious it was. But the mug was warm. Solid. Real. She wrapped both hands around it and let the heat bite, like pain you could choose.
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They stood like that for a few seconds. The storm still battered the house, rain slamming the windows in uneven bursts, wind worrying at the eaves like it wanted an answer. Inside, everything felt too quiet by comparison, the silence stretched tight enough to snap.
Linda’s eyes kept flicking—not to the cupboard, not directly, not anymore—but to the corner of the room where it lived. As if the space had learned the shape of what she’d almost done and was holding it there for her to remember.
Jolie stayed where she was. Not blocking. Not crowding. Present in the way you were present for an animal that might bolt—hands visible, voice steady, body angled sideways so the room didn’t feel like a trap.
Linda lifted the mug and took a careful sip.
It was good.
She blinked at it, surprised, and then another sound escaped her—half laugh, half sob. It scraped on the way out, like her throat had forgotten how to do anything but swallow.
“This is... really good tea,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t know how you’ve managed that, given the circumstances.”
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Jolie smiled, small and involuntary. “Alice says that all the time,” she said. “Says it makes her forget when things are more...” She trailed off, then shrugged. “Loud.”
Linda nodded, throat tightening.
Loud wasn’t just noise. Loud was panic. Loud was memory pressing too close. Loud was the world refusing to behave, while your body insisted on continuing like it could still be negotiated with.
Jolie watched Linda’s knuckles whiten around the mug and softened her voice again. “You’re doing it,” she said. “Breathing. Even if it’s ugly. Even if it’s not the way you want. You’re still doing it.”
Linda stared into the tea like it might reveal something she’d missed. Steam fogged her lashes. Her hands trembled in small, involuntary bursts. She tightened her grip until it steadied.
Jolie shifted, hand dipping into her coat pocket. “I, uh—there was something else.” She pulled out a folded piece of paper and hesitated, just long enough for Linda to recognise the shape. “I believe this is from you.”
Linda’s breath left her in a rush, as if her body had been waiting to empty itself the moment it saw it.
Her goodbye note.
The one she’d pushed through Alice and Jolie’s letterbox yesterday like she was posting a problem somewhere else to solve. Like distance could turn desperation into something more reasonable.
Jolie held it out, not like evidence. Not like judgement. Just an object returning to its owner.
“There was another reason I came by your house this morning,” Jolie said quietly. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Linda took the paper. Her hands shook so badly the fold slipped open, words flashing up at her—too neat, too final. Her own handwriting looked unfamiliar, like it belonged to someone who’d already left.
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“I wish I never wrote it,” she said, voice breaking completely now. Tears spilled, hot and humiliating. “Alice was right. If I’d done it—if I’d gone through with it—Skye would have found me. It doesn’t matter that I chose not to. The fact I nearly did means I’m not safe.”
“Linda—” Jolie began, stepping forward on instinct.
“No.” Linda shook her head hard, tears streaking down her face. She clutched the note like it was burning her. “Listen. Ever since Alice confronted me last night, I’ve watched you both this morning—putting Skye first. Every decision. Every breath.” Her voice cracked open on breath, as if the word itself had teeth. “And I feel... confident when I say this.”
Jolie stillened, eyes narrowing slightly—not suspicion, just focus. The social worker part of her recognising a moment that mattered.
Linda swallowed against the flood in her throat. “I want you and Alice to raise Skye.”
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Jolie froze.
Not in disbelief. In the sudden, stunned stillness of someone handed a responsibility too big to fit through the door.
“I’ll still visit,” Linda rushed on, panic sharpening her words. “I’m not disappearing. But she needs constants. And I can’t be that right now. I trust you both with her life.”
“That’s...” Jolie swallowed. Her voice came out careful, because the wrong tone could turn this into a fight and Linda didn’t have the strength for one. “That’s a lot. I mean—Alice mentioned something, this morning, in passing. But we didn’t—”
“I know you want kids someday,” Linda said gently, too gently, as if saying it softly might make it less invasive.
Jolie flushed, caught. “Linda—”
“But Skye is twelve,” Linda continued, pressing on before doubt could pull her under. “Like Alice said. She needs someone who is her constant. She shouldn’t have to worry about me.”
Jolie’s expression softened, pained. “She does worry about you,” she said. “She saw your wrists. That’s why she wanted you to stay.” Jolie’s voice tightened at the edges. “What you’re asking is a change for her. She wouldn’t be living here anymore.”
“I know,” Linda whispered. “But I think it’s the best choice for her.”
The rain struck the window in a sudden hard burst, as if punctuating the sentence. The house shuddered slightly. Linda flinched anyway.
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Jolie held Linda’s gaze and didn’t rush to fill the silence. She let the words settle. Let them exist without immediately being corrected.
Then she nodded slowly. “Maybe we ask Skye,” she said. “Before we decide. Let her have some input. It would help the transition for her if she has some say in what happens to her. Even a little.”
Linda exhaled shakily. Relief and guilt collided in her chest, making her dizzy. “That’s... that’s a good idea.”
Jolie reached out and, with visible slowness, touched Linda’s forearm—light, grounding. “We’ll do it carefully,” she said. “Not like an ultimatum. Not like a vote she can lose. Just... a way to make her feel less helpless.”
Linda nodded, biting down on another sob. “Thank you.”
Jolie’s mouth twitched. “Don’t thank me yet. We still have to get through the next ten minutes without the weather taking the roof off.”
They packed in quiet coordination after that, the air between them altered—heavier, but steadier. Jolie moved with practiced efficiency: chargers, toiletries, Skye’s spare clothes, anything that would make the next location less like exile. Linda’s hands shook, but her motions became more purposeful with each item. Folding, zipping, checking. Small tasks that didn’t ask her to solve the universe.
Once, Linda paused with Skye’s jumper in her hands—too small for anything but the child upstairs—and pressed it briefly to her face before she could stop herself. She smelled detergent. Damp wool. Something faintly sweet that made her throat close.
Jolie didn’t comment. She only zipped the bag when Linda was ready and said, softly, “Okay. Let’s go.”
When they stepped back into the rain, it soaked through them instantly, cold and relentless. The wind shoved at their shoulders, trying to turn them around. Water ran off the hood of the car in sheets.
Jack raised an eyebrow as they loaded the bags. “What took so long?”
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Jolie didn’t miss a beat. “Cupboard collapse,” she lied smoothly.
Jack snorted, almost amused.
Then he went quiet.
Linda noticed immediately. That was the thing about Jack—he didn’t do silence accidentally.
“Is something the matter?” she asked, voice thin.
“Yes,” Jack said. He hesitated, jaw tightening. “There is.”
The car pulled away from the kerb, wipers fighting the rain like the glass was losing a war. Streetlights smeared into yellow streaks and broke apart in the floodwater pooled along the gutters.
Jack kept both hands on the wheel. His shoulders stayed tense, as if his body was bracing for impact that hadn’t arrived yet.
“I believe you,” he said finally.
Linda’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“My wife verified it,” Jack continued, glancing at Linda in the rearview mirror. “Which is... fucking impossible.” He swallowed, as if the sentence tasted wrong. “But it explains why James put out those warnings. ‘Skye must die.’”
Linda’s heart stuttered, then slammed into her ribs hard enough to hurt.
Jolie turned in the passenger seat. “What happened?”
“There was an argument at the church,” Jack said. “About how she’s alive. People don’t do impossible quietly.” His grip tightened. “Skye got overwhelmed. She had a seizure.”
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Linda lunged forward. “What—”
“It put her into a coma,” Jack said quickly, voice firm with the kind of calm you used when someone might break in your hands. “She’s stable. They’re watching her. She was breathing. Pulse strong. Not... not gone. But unconscious.”
Linda’s vision tunneled. Her fingers clawed at the edge of her seat. “No. No, no, no—”
“Linda,” Jolie said sharply, reaching back, grabbing her wrist. “Breathe. In. Out. Look at me.”
Linda tried. The air felt too thick to move through. Her lungs seized as if refusing.
Jack kept talking, because sometimes talking was a rope you threw to someone drowning. “Before she lost consciousness—before they sedated her—she was shouting names. Over and over.”
Linda’s breath came too fast. “What names?”
Jack’s voice dropped. “Anna. And Elias.”
The world tilted.
Elias.
The man at the hospital. Margaret’s “grandson.” Too young. Too calm. Eyes that looked like they’d already buried too many people to be surprised by one more.
“It’s him,” Linda whispered. “It has to be.”
She leaned forward, words spilling. “The person I mentioned back at Mick’s. Elias. I thought Margaret had something to do with Skye’s return. But he only looked thirty. Just over.”
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“That’s impossible,” Jolie said, shaken. “No one can bring someone back from the dead. If that happened, the world would—”
Linda gestured sharply at the windows, where the storm raged like it had teeth. “Like this. Power fluctuations. Strange weather. Face it, Jolie—the world is reacting to my daughter’s return like a body reacting to a bleed.”
Jack exhaled slowly. “There’s more.”
Both women turned, as if the words physically pulled them.
“Simon told me to check out who Elias Marlowe is in the database,” Jack said. “So I asked control to run it.”
Linda nodded faintly, throat tight. “I forgot I told him about Elias. He was busy getting to the church. He didn’t think it was relevant at the time.”
“He thought it was relevant now,” Jack said grimly. “Most of the file’s redacted. Sounds like government spook stuff to me. But control pulled what they could from local systems—birth registrations, death certificates, census returns, archived family links. You don’t need clearance for those.” His jaw flexed. “The classified parts? They couldn’t see. But they could see enough to know something didn’t add up.”
Jolie’s brow furrowed. “How?”
Jack kept his eyes on the road. “Because even with redactions, you still get metadata. Dates that exist, even if you can’t read the details. And because someone in control—someone older—recognised the surname and went digging in open archives. It wasn’t heroic. It was stubborn.”
The rain slammed harder, as if offended by the idea of records.
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Jack glanced at Linda. “Linda. Elias isn’t Margaret’s grandson.”
Jolie’s voice was barely sound. “Then who is he?”
Jack swallowed. “There’s only one Elias in Margaret’s family tree. Back in 1943. Margaret had a different surname then, all lived in Germany during the war.”
Linda’s mouth went dry.
“They found the record trail,” Jack continued, slower now, as if pacing himself because the next words might detonate. “An older brother—Elias. A younger sister—Anna. Same surname Margaret had at birth.”
Linda’s fingers curled into the seatbelt. Hard enough to hurt.
“And—” she whispered, already knowing there was no version of this sentence that ended safely.
Jack’s voice dropped. Not dramatic. Worse. Flat with the weight of fact.
“They both died. In the gas chambers.”
The car seemed to contract around them.
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Jolie sucked in a sharp breath before she could stop herself. It came out thin and shaking, like air pulled through a crack. Her hand flew instinctively to her mouth, eyes unfocusing for a second as if her brain had refused to process the image fast enough.
Linda didn’t move.
Something cold slid down her spine — not fear, not grief, but recognition. The sickening sensation of two truths colliding so violently they warped everything around them.
“No,” Jolie said quietly, the word escaping before she could censor it. “That— that can’t—”
“I know,It doesn’t make sense,” Jack said automatically, as if saying it aloud might force the universe back into line. “He’d be over a hundred years old.”
Linda laughed once.
It was a terrible sound. Short. Disbelieving. Almost hysterical.
“Jack,My daughter was buried,” she said, and her voice was steady in a way that frightened her. “Five years ago. I watched them lower the coffin. I watched the ground close over her. And yet last night she came back like five years has not happened. She came back wearing the same clothes.”
She swallowed, throat burning.
“The man who killed her had Nazi memorabilia in his house. Wants her dead again. And now you’re telling me the person who might have brought her back survived one of the most systematic exterminations in human history — and she’s screaming his name?”
She met Jack’s eyes in the mirror. Tears streamed unchecked now, but her gaze didn’t waver.
“You still think this is random?”
The wipers shrieked across the windscreen, fighting rain that came down like punishment.
Jack didn’t answer immediately.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter — stripped of professional detachment.
“If this is true,” he said, “and Elias is alive... hasn’t aged... can’t die...”
He shook his head once.
“Then why her? Why Skye specifically?”
Her mind kept colliding with the same immovable wall: dead meant dead. Five years meant five years. The world was supposed to stay where it was buried.
And yet—
She didn’t finish the thought.
Jolie had gone very still.
Not frozen — focused. The way she got when something slid sideways inside her, when information stopped being abstract and started pressing against lived experience. Her brow creased, not in confusion but in recognition she didn’t yet have language for.
Genocide.
A child.
Survival where there shouldn’t have been any.
Jolie’s fingers tightened slowly in her lap. She exhaled through her nose, long and measured, as if grounding herself before stepping closer to something fragile.
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“This isn’t—” she began, then stopped.
She tried again, softer. More careful.
“This doesn’t feel random.”
Linda turned toward her, searching her face.
Jolie didn’t meet her eyes straight away. She was looking at the rain instead, watching it distort the world outside the glass, as if the weather itself was struggling to keep its shape.
“I don’t know why,” Jolie said. “Not yet. But...”
Her voice trailed off, then steadied.
“I’ve seen people live long enough that coincidence stops meaning what it does to the rest of us.”
Silence settled in the car — not empty, but weighted.
Jolie felt it then.
Not a theory.
Not a story.
A shape, pressing up from beneath the facts.
She swallowed, pulse ticking at the base of her throat.
When she finally spoke again, her voice was low and deliberate, like she was choosing each word by touch rather than sight.
“I think maybe from his perspective...”
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Jolie turned slightly, looking back at Linda as if she could anchor her with eye contact alone.
Her words threaded through the car like a spell you didn’t believe in but couldn’t ignore.
As she continued speaking, the world seemed to tilt—
———-
[Elias]
The motorway roared beneath them, tyres hissing on rain-slick tarmac, the night stretched thin and shaking under the storm.
Callum drove.
Both hands locked on the wheel, shoulders rigid, eyes fixed ahead like the road itself was the only thing holding him together. The dash lit his face in sickly greens and amber—sharp angles, no softness. He hadn’t spoken since they pulled out. He didn’t need to.
Elias sat in the passenger seat.
Still.
Too still.
Rain came sideways, not falling so much as being thrown. The wipers fought it in an uneven rhythm—catch, smear, catch—each pass buying a fraction of a second of visibility before the world dissolved again. The sound of it pressed in—water, metal, speed—until it all blurred into one continuous pressure behind his eyes.
His hands rested in his lap.
They didn’t shake.
That was the worst part.
His body knew how to shake. It had done it in trenches, in corridors full of smoke, on floors slick with blood that wasn’t all his. It had done it after the first time he’d realised he could be broken open and still be forced back into the world.
But tonight, his hands were calm.
As if calm could keep the past where it belonged.
Lightning tore the sky open for a heartbeat. The road flashed white—trees bent wrong, standing water pooling in quick, dark sheets—and then it was gone again.
Elias didn’t flinch.
He felt the light behind his eyes instead.
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A pressure that didn’t belong to weather.
A door that didn’t belong to the present.
Callum corrected for a slick patch without thinking. The car drifted a fraction, then straightened. His jaw clenched as the tyres hissed and found grip again.
Elias watched his hands on the wheel—young hands, steady hands—and something inside him tightened with a quiet, familiar grief.
Not envy.
Recognition.
The part of you that still believed you could keep everyone safe if you just held on hard enough.
The storm hit the car broadside. Callum’s shoulders jolted. He swore under his breath. Kept driving.
Elias stayed still.
Because if he moved—if he let anything show—he didn’t know where it would stop.
He blinked.
The motorway wavered.
Not outside.
Inside him.
A second world slid up behind the first like glass laid over glass.
And it wasn’t gentle about it.
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I think maybe from his perspective...
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Concrete under bare feet.
Cold that wasn’t weather, but absence—air stripped of kindness. A ceiling too low. Walls too close. Breath already wrong before the doors even closed.
Anna’s hand in his.
Small.
Burning hot with fear.
Her fingers had always been warm. She ran hot like a child who still believed in summer, even in winter.
Elias’s hand had been bigger—big enough to protect.
Big enough to promise.
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He remembered squeezing once, hard, like he could press courage into her bones through skin.
“I’ve got you,” he’d told her.
Not bravely.
Automatically.
A big brother’s lie that’s only a lie because the world insists on it.
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...when you watch someone you love die...
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Anna’s fingers slipped from his.
Not dramatically. Not all at once.
Just enough that he knew—before his mind could accept it—that he wouldn’t get them back.
Her mouth moved.
No sound came out.
Her eyes stayed on his.
Not blame.
Not accusation.
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Just a desperate, searching please a child shouldn’t have to ask:
I don’t want to die.
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...when you’ve gone through hell...
The doors sealed.
Metal screamed as it locked.
A sound Elias had learned to hear in every language.
He dragged in a breath in the car and tasted something that wasn’t there.
Old smoke.
Old rot.
Old chemical bitterness.
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Callum shifted, the smallest movement, knuckles whitening as the wind shoved hard at the vehicle. His focus narrowed until the road was a tunnel.
Elias didn’t look at him.
He couldn’t afford anything human right now. Human turned into remembering, and remembering turned into breaking.
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...when you survive and they don’t...
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Elias blinked.
The memory didn’t recede.
It layered.
Anna coughing.
Skye crying.
Two different centuries. The same pitch of terror. The same thin edge of a child trying to be brave because adults were failing.
Callum hit a puddle. The tyres skated for half a second.
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Elias’s body registered the danger and did nothing.
His body had never been frightened of dying.
It was frightened of arriving back again.
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...and you live...
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The car surged on, headlights carving a narrow tunnel through rain.
Elias had lived.
God, he had lived.
Bullets.
Fire.
Collapsed buildings.
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Gas.
Rubble.
Disease.
War after war after war.
Time had tried to grind him down like any other man.
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Death had tried to take him like it took everyone else.
And every time he should have been done—every time he had felt the final pull, the quiet surrender of a body allowed to stop—
something had shoved him back.
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Not mercy.
Not purpose.
Not even punishment with a clear lesson.
Just refusal.
Like the universe looked at him and said: not yet, and meant it as a sentence.
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...and you watch over the years, the decades...
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Faces flickered behind his eyes.
Friends who married, then greyed, then died.
Children who grew into adults while he stayed the same.
Hands he held at funerals that later became hands on their own coffins.
Names he learned, loved, lost—until he stopped letting names get too close.
He watched the world change its clothes—new wars, new languages, new ways to pretend cruelty was necessary.
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And he stayed.
Always the same age in the mirror.
Always the same grief behind the eyes.
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...as everyone you love slowly fades away with age, war, any matter of death...
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Elias’s jaw tightened.
Outside, the storm made everything look temporary.
Trees bent like they were pleading.
Road signs swayed.
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The sky cracked open again, light spilling for half a second like someone had ripped the world at the seam.
Callum’s breathing was loud in the small space of the car now—controlled, deliberate—like he was trying not to disturb something dangerous.
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Elias understood that too.
The way you breathed when you were trapped in a room with grief and you didn’t know what it might do if you startled it.
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...while you don’t age...
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Elias glanced down at his hands.
Unchanged.
Always unchanged.
The same hands that had failed to hold on.
Hands that had tried to build safety out of nothing but instinct and stubbornness.
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Hands that had been washed in blood and then washed again and again until the skin forgot it was allowed to feel anything.
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...while death keeps refusing you...
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Thunder cracked close enough that the car vibrated, the sound punching straight through the chassis and into Elias’s chest.
He welcomed it.
Pain was proof of timing.
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Pain meant the world still obeyed some kind of physics.
It was the only rule left that didn’t betray him.
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...but keeps taking everyone else away...
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Skye’s voice cut through the memory like a blade.
I want to go home.
Not screaming.
Not begging.
Just lost.
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Elias shut his eyes, and for a second he saw her exactly as she had been: rain stuck to her hair, cheeks flushed with shock, a child’s stubborn dignity trying to hold the world together with words.
And underneath it—
Anna’s face.
Same shape of fear.
Same desperate need for someone older to make it stop.
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Elias’s throat burned.
He swallowed.
Hard.
Like swallowing could force time back into order.
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...so the only choice you have is to keep going...
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The motorway stretched on endlessly ahead of them, lanes narrowing into darkness.
Callum drove like the road could redeem him. Like speed could create distance from what he’d seen tonight.
Elias watched the rain turn the world into a smear and understood, with dull clarity, why people prayed.
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Not because prayer worked.
Because you needed somewhere to put the helplessness.
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...and when you reach an opportunity...
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Elias’s fingers curled slowly into his palm.
Not a fist.
A decision.
The kind made quietly, because making it loudly would mean admitting you were choosing.
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...an opportunity to save someone...
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Rainwater sheeted across the windscreen, briefly blinding them before the wipers fought it back again.
The world surged forward, relentless.
Elias remembered another kind of blindness—a boundary without rules, air without mercy, darkness that wasn’t night but design, the space between worlds, between life and death. A space he has visited many times before when he died, only this time, alive.
His chest hitched.
He forced it down.
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...anyone...
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Not the whole town.
Not the whole war.
Just—
One.
One set of small hands.
One voice calling for home.
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...to bring someone back from the dead...
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Elias’s pulse thudded once, hard, like an animal testing a cage.
He didn’t let his face change.
Because the last time he’d looked like he wanted something, the world had punished him for it.
But inside him, something rose up—old and furious and heartbreakingly simple:
No.
Not again.
Not another child swallowed by the rules while adults stood around discussing whether rules mattered more than lives.
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...someone that might remind you of the first person you failed...
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The gas chamber doors closed again in his mind.
Anna’s hand slipping.
The exact moment he knew.
Not that she was dying.
He’d known that already, in the way children knew hunger—constant, unavoidable.
The moment he knew was this:
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He couldn’t fix it.
Not with strength.
Not with love.
Not with being her big brother.
He could die with her and it still wouldn’t count as saving.
He could scream at God until his throat tore and it would still not change the physics of cruelty.
He had died alongside her.
And it had not been enough.
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...your sister?
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His breath fractured.
A sound escaped him then—small, involuntary.
Not a sob.
Not a word.
Just the broken edge of something inside him catching.
Callum glanced sideways, just for a second.
Saw Elias’s face in the dash light—pale, blank, eyes too bright.
Callum looked back to the road immediately.
Not because he didn’t care.
Because he did.
And caring made you reach, and reaching was how you got pulled into a grief you couldn’t survive.
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..What would you do?
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The question didn’t echo.
It didn’t demand an answer.
It simply existed—like a line drawn in the dark, waiting to see if he would step over it.
Elias stared straight ahead as the past and present folded over each other, every death he had survived lining up behind the one choice he had made.
Not to save the world.
Not to rewrite history.
Not to fix the rules.
Just—
One child.
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One ending refused.
A mercy so small it should have been nothing.
A mercy so huge it might break everything.
Rain hammered the roof like fists.
The motorway disappeared into weather.
Callum drove on, silent, trying to stay inside the lane and inside reality.
And Elias sat beside him, burning with the unbearable weight of a promise he couldn’t keep the first time—
and had dared to try again anyway.
—————-
Back in the car, Linda’s voice was a whisper, barely present.
“What would you do?,” she repeated, not as a question now—an answer forming without permission.
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Jack glanced between them. “I think you’re overqualified to be a social worker,” he muttered, a thin attempt at levity that didn’t quite land but still warmed the air by a fraction.
Jolie shook her head faintly. “It was just a suggestion, but from the information we’ve been given, if Elias has lived that long, he would have saved her because he’s probably tired of losing people, anyone would if they were suddenly immortal.”
Linda stared out at the storm. “I have a feeling you might be right,” she said, voice cracking. “But the question is how, how is he immortal? How did he bring my daughter back? Why her?.”
Jolie swallowed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But what I do know is Skye needs help.”
Jack nodded once, grim, but he didn’t reach for comfort or certainty. He just drove.
The car pushed on through the storm, wipers fighting to keep a thin strip of world visible. Streetlights smeared. Floodwater shivered under the tyres. Suffolk dissolved into weather and necessity.
Inside the vehicle, three adults clung to what they could—fear, responsibility, a child the world refused to let stay dead.
And somewhere out on the same rain-cut roads, another set of headlights carved forward through the dark—another car, another weight of history, turning inevitably toward the same point.
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and then Add to home screen.