Joel's Simp

MASTERLIST

REAL PERSON - PEDRO PASCAL STILL

Pairing: Pedro Pascal x female reader.

Summary: In stillness, truth shows its face. Where others see scenes, she sees soul. Where others capture light, she captures presence.

No one on set knows her real name — not the directors, not the PAs, not even the actors. She signs her work simply as Still. Clean. Final. Like the last moment before cut.

A year in the set of such a big production like the Last of Us can change everything.

Tags: age gap (reader is 29, Pedro is 46), fluff, mentions of alcohol, mental health issues, pandemic times, no use of y/n, eventual smut MDNI. slow burn. Based on the production of the first season of the show, but it's a fanfic after all, so some stuff won't be 100% accurate. Translation of an on-going fanfic (English is not my first language, let me know if there's something to fix)

THE WALKING DEAD TROUBLE

Pairing: Rick Grimes x Original Character x Daryl Dixon eventually.

Summary: Trouble… Sam Walsh don't know her life without that word. It was always one trouble, after another, after another. And her only certainty and security was that her brother would always do everything for her.

Even if "everything" meant more trouble.

Tags: Parental neglect, eventual smut MDNI. slow burn. Dad with alcohol problems, maternal abandonment, the first part takes place before the outbreak, small town, drug use, violence due to alcohol use, cheating (if this is not something you like, just dont read it?), small age gap (Sam is 23, Rick is 29), Brother's Best-Friend. I'll tag each chapter if there's more stuff. This will be a two part of multiple chapters. Starts around a year before the outbreak, and the second part will hopefully cover seasons 1 and 2 of the show. This is a Translation of an on-going fanfic (English is not my first language, let me know if there's something to fix)

PEAKY BLINDERS A WHISKEY AND A SMOKE

A WHISKEY AND A SMOKE Pairing: Thomas Shelby x Original Female Character

Summary: Margaret Allen has already lived through more than most people twice her age.

A nurse who served on the front lines of the Great War, she returns to England with steady hands and a fractured heart. Her fiancé never made it home. The trenches did. The silence did. The memories did. When London begins to feel too small for her grief, Margaret accepts a position at a reputable hospital in Birmingham—hoping distance might quiet what the war left behind.

It doesn’t.

Birmingham is smoke, steel, and secrets. And at the center of it stands Thomas Shelby.

She smokes when her hands start to shake. He lights cigarettes when the ghosts get too loud.

W: NURSE JOB IN THE 20'S, ALCOHOL, MENTION OF THE GREAT WAR, SLOW BURN.

11.1K WORDS

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CHAPTER 02 - GARRISON NIGHT

MARGARET'S POV

Birmingham had already learned to test me when I had the will to open my eyes after a full night of shallow sleep and too many thoughts.

It began before breakfast with Mrs. Hodge knocking on my door like the house was on fire.

“Nurse Allen.”

I opened my eyes to a room still half-dark, throat dry, body heavy in that mean way poor sleep leaves behind. For one confused second, I thought I had been back in London. Then the chimneys beyond the window came into focus, black against a bruised morning sky.

Birmingham.

“Nurse Allen,” Mrs. Hodge repeated through the door. “You’ll be late if you mean to lie there contemplating the ceiling.”

“I’m awake,” I called with a voice that sounded like I had swallowed ash.

“That remains to be proven.” She replied.

Her footsteps moved away.

I lay still for another few seconds and listened to the house. Floorboards, pipes, a woman coughing below, a kettle beginning its complaint in the kitchen. No gunshots, or shouting. No men calling for stretcher-bearers.

A civilized morning, then.

My journal sat open on the desk where I had left it. The last line stared at me from across the room.

I wondered, as Birmingham dragged me under, whether that had been my first lie in this city.

I closed it before I could read anything else.

There was little dignity in the way I washed that morning. Cold water with soap that smelled faintly of lye. My hair pinned tighter than comfort allowed because tired hands made careless nurses, and careless nurses killed people. I dressed in my uniform by candlelight, checked my cuffs, then placed Charles’s photograph face-down in the drawer of the desk.

I stood there afterward with my hand still on the handle.

“Forgive me,” I whispered.

Then I shut the drawer and went downstairs.

Mrs. Hodge gave me porridge, tea, and a look that suggested she knew exactly how little I had slept.

“You’ll eat,” she stated.

“I intended to.”

“Intentions are for girls who faint before noon.”

“I don’t faint.”

“See that you don’t.”

I ate because she watched me until I did. The porridge had lumps in it and the tea was too bloody strong, which made both useful. By the time I stepped into the street, my stomach was warm and my head had stopped floating quite so far from my shoulders.

The city looked uglier in the early light. Honest, perhaps. Without darkness to smooth the edges, Birmingham showed its soot stains, its broken cobbles, its men with red eyes and women already carrying baskets too heavy for one arm. Smoke rolled low between buildings. The factory whistles sounded before the church bells did.

I found the hospital without getting lost this time. That felt like a private victory.

Mary was waiting near the nurses’ entrance with a cigarette tucked behind one ear and a piece of bread in her mouth.

“You look terrible,” she said pointing to my face.

“Good morning to you too.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

I looked down with no intention to lie to her “Briefly.”

“That means no.”

“It means briefly.” I repeated it.

She gave me a look, then tore the bread in half and handed me the smaller piece.

“I ate already.”

“I didn’t ask.” Her smile suggested she was having fun with me now.

I took it anyway.

Edith appeared behind her, already in uniform, cap perfect, face composed into its usual dissatisfaction with the world. “You’re both blocking the door.”

Mary stepped aside. “Nurse Allen slept briefly.”

“Most of us do.”

“She means not at all, by the way.” Mary grinned.

Edith looked at me properly. Her gaze paused on the shadows beneath my eyes but did not linger in a way that humiliated me. “Don’t cut bandages with those hands if they start shaking.”

“They won’t.”

“That wasn’t pride asking. That was instruction.”

I held her gaze. “They won’t.” I said more firmly.

She nodded once. “Good.”

The day began hard and did not soften.

Receiving was a different beast from women’s surgical. Louder and faster somehow. Less patient with the illusion of order. Men came in from factories with crushed fingers, burns, cuts, coughing fits, broken ribs from falls they claimed were accidents and bruises whose shapes told better stories. A boy of fifteen arrived with a hand sliced open from a machine belt, trying not to cry while his supervisor complained about lost time. An old woman was carried in by her daughter with pneumonia thick in her lungs. Two policemen brought a drunk whose scalp had split against the pavement, and he sang while Mary held him still.

Ten in the morning, I had blood under one thumbnail despite scrubbing hard enough to sting.

Noon, Matron Hawthorne had watched me set a splint, dress a burn, and calm a child by letting her count my buttons while Edith cleaned grit from her knee.

By two, I had stopped being new.

Or perhaps I had stopped caring whether anyone thought I was.

A man came in near half past three with a gash across his forearm and an attitude large enough to require its own bed.

He was broad, red-faced, and sweating through his shirt, with two other men half-carrying, half-dragging him into receiving. Blood had soaked the towel wrapped around his arm. It dripped onto the floor in dark spots that would be my problem later if no orderly reached it first.

“Doctor,” he barked the moment he saw me.

I stepped toward him. “Sit down.”

“I said doctor.”

“I heard you. Sit down.” My voice came out sharp.

His friends laughed under their breath. The man did not.

“Where’s the doctor?”

“Busy.”

“I’m not having a woman sew me up.”

Mary, standing behind me with a basin, went very still in that dangerous way cheerful women sometimes did before they committed violence.

I held out my hand. “Let me see your arm.”

He pulled it back. “Are you deaf?”

“No.”

“Then fetch me a doctor.”

I looked at the towel, the angle of his wrist, the blood still coming too freely but not pulsing. “You’ve cut through skin and muscle. You’re bleeding steadily, which means you either let me look at it now or you keep sitting there making speeches until you’re weak enough to stop arguing. Your choice.”

His face darkened at my words.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” His sweaty face broke into an anger loud enough for him to bark those words.

“Nurse Allen.”

“That supposed to mean something?”

“It will if you lose use of that hand because you were too proud to be treated by someone wearing an apron.”

One of his friends snorted. The patient turned on him.

“You think it’s funny?”

“I think you’re bleeding on your boot, Frank.”

Frank looked down.

He was, in fact, bleeding on his boot.

I held out my hand again.

He stared at me for several seconds. Men like him made an art of taking up space. Shoulders wide, jaw forward, voice built for rooms where nobody told them no. I had known soldiers like that. Officers too. They were usually the loudest until the wound began to hurt properly, or the fear of loosing a limb struck them.

At last, he shoved his arm toward me.

“There,” he snapped. “Happy?”

“I’m rarely happy during work hours.”

Mary made a small choking sound behind me.

I unwrapped the towel.

The wound opened ugly and deep across the outside of his forearm, ragged at one end where whatever cut him had torn rather than sliced. Glass, perhaps, or metal. It needed cleaning, exploring, stitching. Painful work if done properly.

“That’ll need sewing,” I said.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Get a doctor.”

“A doctor will say it needs sewing, then either do it worse than me or ask me to do half of it while he takes credit.”

Mary turned away sharply. Her shoulders shook.

Frank looked between us. “You mouthy for a nurse.”

“You’re observant for a man losing blood.”

That time his friend laughed outright.

Frank glared at him, then at me. “Do it, then.”

“Mary, carbolic, suture tray, clean cloths, please.”

“Already coming.”

I cleaned the wound while Frank cursed so creatively that even Edith looked impressed when she passed by the doorway.

“Hold still,” I said.

“It bloody hurts.” Frank said as if asking for mercy.

“It will hurt more if you keep jerking away.”

“You enjoying this?”

I kept my eyes on his arm while speaking to him “Not particularly.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

I glanced up at him now. “If I were enjoying it, you’d know.”

For the first time, Frank shut his big mouth. His friends exchanged a look. Mary lowered her face over the tray, lips pressed together.

Stitching flesh was simple once one accepted the brutality of it. Needle through skin, pull, tie, repeat. Make the edges meet cleanly, give the body a chance to remember itself whole. I had done it in candlelight, in mud, in rooms where men screamed, in tents where flies gathered faster than prayers.

Frank watched the needle go in once, then looked at the ceiling and did not look down again.

“You served?” he asked after a minute, voice tighter now.

“Yes.”

“France?”

I made a humming sound also saying yes. His jaw worked.

The room changed around that confirmation, as it often did. France had a way of making even foolish men reconsider the shape of a woman. Some respected it. Some others resented it. Most did not know what to do with the thought of us there, sleeves rolled, hands inside wounds, listening to boys die for a country that would later tell its nurses to be grateful for orderly employment.

Frank swallowed. “My brother didn’t come back.”

I tied another stitch with my heart going colder at his words. “I’m sorry.”

“He was twenty.”

I paused long enough to meet his eyes. “A lot of them were.”

The hardness in his face cracked a little. Not enough to make him gentle, but enough to make him human.

I finished the last stitch and wrapped the arm with clean gauze. “Keep it dry. Come back if the redness spreads, if you develop fever, or if pus forms. Do you know what pus looks like?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“You refused treatment from a nurse while bleeding onto your own boot. I prefer to check.”

Mary made another sound repressing a laugh. Frank stared at me, then gave a short laugh despite himself. “Christ.”

“Close enough. Keep it elevated tonight.”

He stood, flexed his fingers when I told him to, and seemed annoyed that they still worked.

At the door, he stopped and looked back.

“You did that well.”

“I know.”

His mouth twitched. “Right.”

After he left, Mary leaned against the counter and laughed until Edith told her she was useless.

Matron Hawthorne appeared shortly after, because of course she did. I had learned already that the woman could sense disorder through walls.

“Nurse Allen.”

“Yes, Matron.”

“Did you tell a patient a doctor would stitch worse than you?”

I wiped down the tray with deliberate care. “I may have suggested a range of possible outcomes.”

Mary coughed.

Matron looked at her, and suddenly the nurse by my side became fascinated by the floor.

Then Matron turned back to me. “Was the wound properly cleaned?”

“Yes, Matron.”

“Stitches even?”

“Yes.”

“Patient retained full movement?” Her left eyebrow shot up.

“Yes, Matron.”

“Then be less entertaining next time.”

“Yes Ma'am.”

She left without another word.

Mary leaned close. “That means she’s proud.”

“If that woman is ever proud, I imagine birds fall dead from the sky.”

Edith, passing with a stack of forms, said, “Only small ones.”

***

The days found their shape after that.

Hospital. Boarding house. Poor sleep. Work again.

I learned the corridors by sound before sight. Which floorboard creaked near the supply room. Which bell meant urgency and which meant Mrs. Barlow just wanted tea. Which doctor walked as if the building owed him respect. Which orderlies could be trusted with a patient in pain and which needed to be watched. I learned Mary sang under her breath when changing bed linens. Edith kept peppermint lozenges in her pocket and pretended they were medicinal when children cried. Matron Hawthorne could appear silently behind anyone doing anything wrong, an ability I suspected came from years of disappointment sharpened into instinct.

Birmingham learned me too.

Patients began asking for the London nurse, though some said it like accusation and some like hope. Frank returned twice for dressing changes and never once asked for a doctor. Mrs. Barlow announced to anyone within hearing that I was “too thin and too sharp, but useful.” Clara Evans’s infection began to settle after a few days. Mrs. Ellis survived surgery, feverish and weak, but alive enough to curse softly when Mary tried to feed her broth.

I slept in fragments.

The city would quiet, my body would fail at last, and then some sound would tear through the thin walls of Mrs. Hodge’s boarding house. A shout, or a slammed door. A man laughing too loudly in the street followed by a motorcar backfiring. Sometimes there were gunshots. Far off most nights. Close enough on others that even Mrs. Hodge paused in the hallway with her candle held still.

I smoked more than I admitted to anyone.

My journal filled.

19th March, 1921. Birmingham coughs in its sleep.

21st March, 1921. Mary says I look less like I’m planning my escape. Edith says this is because I now look too tired to manage one.

22nd March, 1921. Charles would have been twenty-six next month. I remembered while dressing a burn on a child’s hand and had to ask Mary to pass me gauze twice because I could not remember the word.

24th March, 1921. John Shelby has not appeared again. This seems wise of him.

I told myself I did not look for flat caps when walking past certain streets.

Then, on a Thursday evening after nearly two weeks of work, Mary threw my coat at me.

I was sitting in the changing room, rubbing the heel of my hand into the knot at the back of my neck while Edith untied her apron beside me. The day had been long, wet, and full of infected lungs. My head hurt from carbolic and too little sleep.

“Put that on,” Mary said.

I caught the coat before it hit the floor. “Why?”

“Because we’re going out.”

“No.”

“You didn’t even ask where.”

“I found it unnecessary.”

Edith smiled faintly at her locker.

Mary planted both hands on her hips. “You cannot go from hospital to boarding house to hospital until you die.”

“That sounds efficient.”

“That sounds miserable.”

“I’m fond of routine.”

“You’re fond of hiding inside it.”

I looked at her.

Mary’s expression softened, though she did not apologize. I suspected she was the sort who saved apologies for actual wounds.

“It’s one drink,” she said. “Maybe two if the first doesn’t kill us. Harrison and Peter from cleaning are coming.”

“That is meant to persuade me?”

“They’re harmless.”

“Men described as harmless rarely are.”

“Harrison’s so nervous around women he apologised to a mop yesterday. Peter thinks charm means having both eyebrows intact. You’ll be safe.”

Edith closed her locker. “She’s going to keep asking.”

“I know.”

“She once asked Matron to come dancing.”

Mary lifted her chin. “And one day she’ll say yes.”

“The day after judgment.”

“Fine.” Mary looked at me again. “Come out because I’m asking, because you’ve earned an evening where nobody bleeds on you, and because if I have to listen to Harrison talk about floor polish without another woman beside me, I may commit a crime.”

I sighed.

Mary smiled before I answered. “That’s yes.”

“That was air leaving my body.”

“That’s how yes begins.”

I should have refused. I knew that. My room waited with its candle, its desk, its photograph turned face-down because some nights I could not bear Charles looking young while I got older without him. My books waited. My journal waited. A cigarette by the window waited.

I was tired of things waiting.

“One drink,” I said.

Mary clapped once.

Edith looked at me as if I had chosen poorly, though not without sympathy. “Don’t let her order anything sweet. She has no judgment.”

“I have joy,” Mary said.

“You have a fondness for syrup.”

“Same thing after dark.”

We left the hospital as the evening settled thick over the streets. Rain had fallen earlier and left the cobbles slick. Lamps glowed in puddles. Men in work clothes moved toward pubs in small groups, hunched and hungry for warmth, beer, noise, anything that let the day loosen its grip on their backs.

Harrison and Peter were waiting near the side gate.

I had seen them often enough in corridors, pushing buckets, scrubbing floors, carrying away the evidence of illness with the quiet dignity of men paid poorly for work no hospital could survive without. Harrison was tall and narrow, with sandy hair, ears that turned red when Mary said his name, and hands chapped from soap. Peter was shorter, dark-eyed, and handsome in a way he seemed painfully aware of. He leaned against the gate as if posing for a portrait nobody had commissioned.

“Nurses,” Peter said, sweeping off his cap.

Mary looked at him. “Don’t start.”

“I was being polite.”

“You were being theatrical.”

Harrison smiled at me nervously. “Evening, Nurse Allen.”

“Margaret, if we’re outside the hospital.”

His ears reddened at once. “Margaret. Right.”

Peter’s gaze moved over me, curious but not vulgar enough to make me regret coming. “London nurse joins us at last.”

“For one drink.”

“That’s how many good evenings start.”

“It is also how many mistakes start.”

He grinned. “Depends on the drink.”

Mary hooked her arm through mine before I could reconsider. “Come on. Garrison’s not far.”

“The Garrison?” I asked.

Harrison glanced at Mary.

I felt it. The small exchange. The way Peter looked down the street and then back with too much casualness.

Mary kept walking. “It’s a pub.”

“There are many pubs.” I tried with my voice small.

“This one’s lively.”

“That’s an evasive answer.” Peter noticed it

“It’s local.”

“Mary.”

She sighed. “I know what you're thinking. It’s Shelby.”

My steps slowed.

Peter, walking backward ahead of us, lifted both hands. “Harmless if you don’t owe money.”

“That’s the standard?” I asked.

“In Small Heath, yes.”

Mary squeezed my arm. “We can go elsewhere.”

I thought of John Shelby outside the hospital gates, tipping his cap as if he had not belonged to a family people lowered their voices to name.

“No,” I said. “The Garrison is fine.”

Mary looked at me with open suspicion. “That sounded too brave.”

“I’m told Birmingham doesn’t reward softness.”

“That was Matron. She says things like that because she eats nails for breakfast.”

We turned another corner, and the Garrison came into view.

It was warmer-looking than the street deserved. Amber light spilled from its windows onto the wet pavement, cut by moving shadows inside. The sign above the door was simple letters spelling its name. Laughter rolled out each time someone entered or left, along with smoke, beer, and a burst of piano that stumbled into song before being swallowed by voices.

At first glance, it looked harmless.

That was the most dangerous thing about it.

Inside, heat struck my face. The pub was crowded, thick with men in caps and women with flushed cheeks, factory workers, bookmakers, girls laughing too loudly, old men hunched over pints as if each glass held a private treaty. Cigarette smoke hung low enough to sting the eyes. Somewhere near the back, a piano fought for survival beneath singing voices.

Mary guided us to the bar with the confidence of someone who knew where to place her feet in any room.

Harry, the barman, according to Peter’s whisper, looked us over and gave Mary a nod.

“Usual?”

“Not tonight.” Mary turned to me. “What are you drinking?”

I looked at the bottles behind the bar. “Whiskey.”

Peter’s brows went up. “Straight in, then.”

“Irish,” I said to the barman. “Please.”

Harry’s mouth twitched. “You hear that, boys? London wants her drink the best way.”

A few men at the bar glanced over.

I looked at Harry. “London can hear as well.”

Mary made a small strangled sound beside me. Harry laughed and reached for a bottle. “Irish it is.”

The glass came small, the whiskey gold and sharp-smelling. I lifted it, breathed once, and took a mouthful.

It burned beautifully.

My eyes watered as I refused to cough.

Peter watched with admiration. “Bloody hell.”

Mary patted my arm. “There’s a girl.”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“There’s a woman, then.”

Harrison, who had ordered beer and seemed unsure whether to hold it or apologize for it, leaned close enough to be heard over the noise. “Do you like Birmingham any better now?”

I glanced around. A man shouted at the piano player. Someone laughed near the fireplace. A woman in a green dress slapped a hand away from her waist without missing a note of whatever song she was singing.

“I like the whiskey.”

“That’s a start.”

Peter rested one elbow on the bar. “And the company?”

“The company has yet to prove themselves.”

He grinned, emboldened. “You always this hard to impress?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’d hate easy work.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “Peter, she stitched a man’s arm while insulting him last week. Don’t start battles you can’t afford.”

“I’m not starting a battle. I’m offering peace.”

“With your face?” Harrison muttered.

Peter looked wounded. “My face has done well for me.”

“Your face got you slapped by Annie from laundry.”

“She misunderstood me.”

“She understood enough.”

For the first time that evening, I laughed without catching myself first. The sound left me before I could inspect it. Small, surprised, entirely mine.

Mary looked pleased enough to be irritating.

“There she is,” she said.

“I was here already.”

“No. That was the hospital version.”

“There are versions?”

“At least four.”

“That seems excessive.”

Peter leaned closer. “What’s this version called?”

“Tired,” I said.

“Pretty name.”

Harrison laughed into his beer.

The whiskey settled warm in my stomach. I had not realized how cold I had been until that heat began to spread. Around us, the pub loosened in degrees. Men sang with arms thrown over shoulders. A woman danced between two tables, skirt swaying, cheeks pink. Coins clattered. Glasses struck wood. The whole room breathed smoke and noise and something close to life.

I had forgotten pubs could feel like that.

Before France, Charles and I had gone dancing once in London. He had stepped on my foot twice and blamed the floor both times. I had laughed so hard my side hurt. He had looked at me afterward as if the sight of me happy had startled him.

The memory came, but gently for once.

I took another sip of whiskey.

Peter noticed the shift. “Do you dance, Margaret Allen?”

Mary groaned. “Don’t.”

I looked at him. “Rarely.”

“That’s almost yes.”

“Everyone in Birmingham hears what they want, it's impressive, truly.”

“Only way to survive.” He held out his hand. “One song.”

“No.” I said hiding behind my whiskey.

“One terrible song.”

“No.”

“One half-terrible song.”

Harrison shook his head. “Leave the woman be.”

Mary watched me carefully, perhaps expecting refusal, perhaps hoping I would surprise her.

The piano changed tune. Something quicker. Rough at the edges, easy enough for drunk feet to follow.

I looked at Peter’s hand.

A sensible woman would refuse. A grieving woman might refuse. A nurse who had slept poorly and worked herself to the bone all week should certainly refuse.

I placed my glass on the bar.

“One song,” I said.

Peter’s face lit up. “I knew London had mercy.”

“Don’t waste it.”

He led me into the cleared space near the piano, where three couples were already moving with more enthusiasm than grace. Peter could dance better than I expected. He held me correctly, close enough for the music, not close enough to make a point of it. I let him turn me once, then again, skirt brushing my calves.

For a few minutes, I allowed the room to blur.

Not disappear. I knew better than to ask that much from whiskey and music. But blur, yes. The hospital loosened from my shoulders. Mrs. Hodge’s room grew smaller in the distance. France retreated to some corner where it could watch without speaking. I followed Peter’s steps, corrected him once when he nearly led me into a chair, and laughed when he bowed in apology with ridiculous seriousness.

“There,” he said over the music. “You can have fun.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Secret’s safe.”

“It won’t be if you keep looking so proud.”

He spun me a little too sharply.

I stepped back, caught myself, and collided against someone solid.

A hand closed around my elbow. Firm, quick, and just enough to steady me, not enough to restrain.

“Careful,” a familiar voice said.

I turned.

John Shelby smiled down at me.

Of course he did.

The pub seemed to tilt its attention before anyone moved. It was subtle at first. A conversation near the bar thinning out, or a pair of men at the table behind John sitting a little straighter. Mary’s face across the room changing so fast it almost frightened me.

John’s hand remained at my elbow.

I looked at it.

He let go at once and lifted both hands. “Didn’t want you falling.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“And dancing with Peter from cleaning part of your plan?”

Peter, still beside me, went stiff enough to count as furniture. Coward.

“You know Peter?” I asked.

John’s grin widened. “Everyone knows Peter.”

Peter swallowed. “Evening, John.”

“Peter.”

There was no threat in the way John said it. That made it worse, somehow. The absence of threat had its own authority.

Two men stood behind him.

The first was broad, older, with a moustache and a face flushed from drink or temper. His eyes moved over me with open irritation, taking in the uniform coat beneath my evening one, my London posture, Peter’s hand hovering uselessly nearby. Arthur, I guessed before anyone said his name. Mary had warned me in pieces. Worse when drunk.

He looked as though he was never very far from it.

The second man stood half a step back, and the room changed around him.

He did not need to be the tallest. He was not the loudest. He did not push forward or smile like John. He simply stood there in a dark suit and flat cap, cigarette between his fingers, pale eyes fixed on me with an attention so complete it felt almost physical.

Thomas Shelby.

I knew before John turned his head.

“Tommy,” John said, and there was something in his voice now. Amusement, yes, but caution threaded through it. “This is the London nurse.”

Thomas Shelby’s gaze did not move from mine.

“The one from the station,” he said.

His voice was quiet.

That was the first thing I noticed. In a room built from shouting, he made quiet do the work.

My pulse gave one hard beat.

I hated that.

“The station has many people in it,” I said.

John laughed under his breath.

Tommy took a drag from his cigarette, eyes still on me. “Not many arrive and insult my brother before tea.”

“I didn’t know he was your brother.”

“Would that have changed anything?”

“No.”

John laughed properly then. “Told you.”

Arthur’s mouth twisted. “She’s got a tongue on her.”

I looked at him. “I was born with one.”

Mary appeared at my side before Arthur could answer, breathless without looking like she had hurried.

“There you are,” she said brightly, too brightly. “Margaret, I think we ought to get back. Early shift tomorrow, remember?”

“I remember.”

Her hand touched my wrist in warning.

Peter stepped away as though grateful to be released from the center of the room.

John looked at Mary. “Nurse Doyle.”

“John Shelby.”

“You keeping her out of trouble?”

“I’m trying to.”

“I don’t require keeping,” I said.

Mary’s fingers tightened once.

Tommy’s eyes flicked to her hand on my wrist, then back to me. He noticed everything. I felt that at once and disliked how quickly I knew it.

“You work at the hospital,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Matron Hawthorne still terrifying everyone?”

“Only those with sense.”

A faint movement touched his mouth. Almost a smile, if one were charitable.

Arthur snorted. “You always answer back?”

“When spoken to.”

“That’s answer enough.”

I turned to him fully. “Then you may stop speaking.”

The air changed, as if I committed a crime. Even John went still.

Mary whispered my name in warning, “Margaret.”

Arthur’s face darkened all at once. “You know who you’re talking to?”

“No,” I said honestly. “But Mary has been trying to educate me.”

John rubbed a hand over his mouth, poorly hiding amusement.

Tommy did not laugh. He watched me like one might watch a match burn close to spilled spirit.

“I’m Arthur Shelby,” the older man said.

“Margaret Allen.”

“I didn’t fucking ask.” Arthur snared as he took one step forward.

Tommy spoke before Mary could drag me bodily toward the door.

“Arthur.”

One word. Low and full of authority.

Arthur stopped.

It was not obedience exactly. It was habit sharpened by family and command. He looked at Tommy, jaw working tight, then stepped back with a curse under his breath.

Tommy’s gaze returned to me. “You’re brave for someone new to Small Heath.”

“I’m tired. People often mistake the two.”

There. That faint almost-smile again.

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Tired.”

“Yes.”

“Then why come to the Garrison?”

I could have said Mary asked me. I could have said I only came for one drink, or that I did not know the place belonged to his family, though by then I suspected every chair and shadow in it had some tie to the Shelby name.

Instead, I looked around the pub. Saw the smoke, tables, the men pretending not to listen to our exchange, and the women watching with sharper eyes than any of them. The piano player holding his hands above the keys, uncertain whether music was allowed to continue.

“Because hospitals are full of the dying,” I said. “I wanted a room full of people pretending they aren’t.”

All three brothers had a different reaction to my words. John’s expression shifted into understanding. Arthur’s irritation faltered for half a second, confused by honesty where insult should have been.

Tommy grew very still.

His eyes did something then. Lowered, briefly, to the glass of whiskey I had left at the bar. Back to my face, just past the tiredness, perhaps. Past the sharpness I always show. Men looked at women all the time, but this was not quite that. He looked as if he was reading the cost of every word and finding the numbers familiar.

“You served,” he said.

“I nursed.”

“In France.”

“Yes.”

The pub around us was too loud and too quiet at once.

Mary’s hand left my wrist. Maybe because she trusted me, or maybe because she knew pulling me away now would make things worse.

Tommy lowered his cigarette. “Then you’ve earned your whiskey.”

“I paid for it.”

“I didn’t say you hadn’t.”

Strong personalities met strangely. That was my thought, sudden and clear. Some people argued to overpower. Some other argued to test the walls. Thomas Shelby, from what little I could see, did neither. He placed a sentence down and waited to see whether I stepped around it or cut through.

I did not yet know what that made him.

Dangerous seemed too simple.

Peter, poor man, cleared his throat. “We were only dancing.”

Arthur looked at him. “No one asked you.”

Peter shut his mouth immediately.

I glanced at him, then at Arthur. “He was just stating the fact.”

Arthur blinked. “What?”

“We were dancing. He asked, I agreed. Nobody committed a crime unless dancing has become illegal in Birmingham since I arrived.”

John let out a delighted sound. “Christ, Tommy, can we keep her?”

Mary closed her eyes.

Tommy looked at John. “No.”

The answer came too quickly.

Something warm and ridiculous sparked under my ribs. Amusement, mixed with the whiskey and lack of sleep.

“Wise,” I said. “I’m expensive to maintain.”

John grinned. “Knew it.”

Arthur muttered, “This is fucking stupid.”

Mary seized the opening. “Right. We’re leaving.”

“Already?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s had half a drink.”

“She has an early shift.”

Tommy looked at my almost untouched whiskey on the bar. “Finish it.”

Mary stiffened by my side and I looked at him.

It was not quite an order. Too quiet for that. Too sure of itself to be anything else.

“I don’t take instruction off duty,” I said.

His eyes held mine.

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do.”

Then he stepped to the bar, picked up my glass, and brought it to me.

He simply held it out with the same expression he wore the whole night.

The room watched.

So did I.

His fingers were clean but scarred faintly along the knuckles. His cuff sat neat beneath his jacket. The cigarette smoke clung to him, but beneath it was another scent, soap perhaps, whiskey, cold air from outside. His eyes were paler up close. Blue, yes, though blue felt insufficient. There were men who wore their wounds loudly. Thomas Shelby kept his behind stillness, and for some reason that unsettled me more.

I took the glass from him without letting our fingers touch.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Margaret Allen.”

My name in his mouth sounded different than when John said it. Less teasing, more deliberate. As if he had placed it somewhere in his mind already and meant to remember where.

“You know everyone around here?” I asked.

“Most.”

“And those you don’t?”

“I learn.”

Air left me in the form of a small laugh “That sounds exhausting.”

“It has uses.” Thomas' eyes stayed glued to mine.

“I imagine it does.”

Arthur watched us with open dislike now. John watched as if he had discovered a new form of entertainment. Mary watched with the expression of a woman calculating how many exits stood between me and disaster.

I drank the rest of the whiskey.

All of it.

It burned hotter this time, or that was only because Thomas Shelby stood close enough to notice whether I flinched.

I didn’t.

His mouth moved again. There and gone. “Irish aye?!”

“The best kind. Harry has a talent.”

“Harry pours what he’s told.”

“Useful man.”

“Sometimes.”

I handed the empty glass to the bar without looking away from Tommy. “Good evening, Mr. Shelby.”

John made a small noise at the formality of it.

Tommy inclined his head. “Nurse Allen.”

Mary caught my arm then, less warning now and more necessity, and pulled me toward the door before I could say anything else unwise.

Harrison and Peter followed fast. Peter looked as though he had aged three years during one song. Harrison kept glancing over his shoulder.

The cold outside struck me across the face.

I welcomed it.

Mary did not speak until we were half a street away from the Garrison. Then she stopped, turned to me, and pressed both hands over her own mouth as if holding in either laughter or a scream.

“What?” I asked.

She dropped her hands. “What?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Margaret.”

“Yes?”

“You told Arthur Shelby to stop speaking.”

“He was unpleasant.”

“You told Arthur Shelby to stop speaking.” She repeated as if it was any different from the first time.

“So you’ve said.”

Peter, behind us, let out a nervous laugh. “I thought he was going to knock me through the piano.”

“Why would he knock you through the piano?” I asked.

“Because I was standing closest.”

“That’s poor reasoning.”

“That’s Arthur.”

Harrison shook his head slowly. “Tommy stopped him.”

Mary looked at me when Harrison said it.

I looked back.

The street seemed colder now. The whiskey sat in my blood, warm and bold, making my fingers tingle inside my gloves.

“He seems very used to stopping him,” I said.

“He is,” Mary replied.

“And John?”

“John likes trouble.”

“So he likes himself then.”

Peter laughed before fear could stop him.

Mary pointed a finger at me. “You are going to get yourself killed with that mouth.”

“Possibly. Though at least Birmingham will have been warned.”

She stared at me a second longer, then laughed despite herself. The sound cracked the tension enough for all of us to begin walking again.

But I could still feel the Garrison behind me.

That room with thick smoke. That pale gaze fixed on mine with unsettling patience.

Thomas Shelby had known my name before I offered it. He knew the hospital, knew Matron Hawthorne, knew enough of me to say I had served before I wished to speak of it. Mary had said he owned enough of the men walking the streets. I felt that truth tonight.

Perhaps some men did not need to own a place in order to make it answer when they entered.

At Mrs. Hodge’s door, Mary turned to me with a look that had lost most of its laughter.

“Promise me something.”

“I dislike promising before I know the terms.”

“Try.”

I waited.

“If John speaks to you again, be careful. If Arthur speaks to you, find me. If Tommy speaks to you...” She paused.

The pause said more than the warning.

“If Thomas Shelby speaks to me?” I asked.

Mary’s eyes searched mine. “Remember he does nothing without deciding why first.”

The whiskey warmth faded a little.

I nodded.

Mary seemed unsatisfied, but she let me go.

Upstairs, my room was cold and exactly as I had left it. Charles’s photograph lay face-down in the drawer. My journal waited on the desk. The city muttered outside the window, softer tonight, though no kinder.

I removed my gloves slowly.

My hands were steady.

I lit a cigarette and opened the window either way. Smoke drifted into Birmingham’s smoke until mine became impossible to separate from the rest of it.

After a while, I sat and opened the journal.

26th March, 1921.

Went to the Garrison with Mary, Harrison, and Peter. Drank Irish whiskey. Danced once. Met John Shelby again. Met Arthur Shelby and lived, despite speaking unwisely.

I paused, pen hovering above the page.

Then I wrote:

Met Thomas Shelby.

The line looked bare.

I stared at it for some time.

There were many things I could have added. Quiet voice. Pale eyes. Dangerous stillness. Knows too much. Watches as if waiting for the blood to show through the bandage.

Instead, I wrote only one more sentence.

I think Mary is frightened of him.

I closed the journal before I could add that I was not sure I was.

Outside, somewhere in Small Heath, a man laughed, a door slammed, and the night carried on with all its ordinary violence.

I finished my cigarette by the window.

Sleep did not come easily.

It rarely did.

But when I finally lay down, the last thing I saw before closing my eyes was not France. It was not Charles, though guilt came soft and sharp at the edges when I admitted it.

It was Thomas Shelby standing in smoke, holding out my whiskey as if he already knew I would take it.

THOMAS POV

John was right, she was stunning and stubborn all at once. So Thomas watched her from across the room quietly.

That was the first mistake most men made about him. They assumed he only noticed what he looked at directly. They assumed quiet meant absence. They mistook stillness for disinterest, and by the time they realised stillness could be a blade held flat against the palm, it was usually too late to stop bleeding.

He had seen her at the bar first.

London coat. Nurse’s posture. Gloves still on though the Garrison had enough heat and smoke inside to soften paint. She stood with Mary Doyle and the two hospital cleaners, Harrison and Peter, as if she had agreed to come and already regretted the public nature of the decision. Her hair was pinned with care, though a few darker strands had escaped around her face from the damp outside. Her skin held the tired pallor of someone sleeping badly and refusing to discuss it. Her mouth was made for refusing things.

And then she ordered whiskey.

Irish. Just like his.

Tommy had been standing near the side door with Arthur and John, speaking to a man from Camden about a shipment of cigarettes and the cost of moving men through London without troubling the wrong police sergeant. He had kept half an ear on the conversation and the rest on the pub, as usual. The Garrison was useful because men forgot who might be listening once drink loosened their teeth.

Then Harry the barman laughed and said something to her.

Tommy looked over.

The woman looked back at Harry with no smile at all and answered him as if every man in the pub was a schoolboy daring her to blink.

John had snorted into his glass.

“That’s her,” he said. “The nurse from the station.”

Arthur barely looked. “What nurse?”

“The one I told you about.”

Arthur drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You tell us about a lot of women, Johnny boy.”

“Not like this one.”

Tommy’s eyes stayed on her.

She took the whiskey and drank it as if the burn was something she knew how to use. It hit her. He saw it in the faint tightening around her eyes, the stillness at her throat. She did not cough. Pride, then. Or practice. Perhaps both.

“What’s her name?” Tommy asked.

John smiled at him. “Margaret, London girl, served in France.”

“You got all that walking her to the hospital?”

“Got more than that.”

Arthur made a noise. “Course you did.”

“She was lost.”

“Was she really?” Tommy asked quietly.

John looked at him. “Kind of”

“Because women like that don’t admit when they are.”

John’s smile widened. “You’d like her.”

Tommy lifted his cigarette and took a slow drag. “I know.”

Arthur looked between them, irritated already and not sure why. “We working or watching John’s new nurse?”

“We’re working,” Tommy said.

He returned his attention to the man from Camden, listened to three more minutes of prices, risk, routes, and promises. He spoke little. Asked two questions. Corrected one figure. Decided the man was either careless or lying, and either way would need watching.

Still, his eyes found her again.

Peter from cleaning was leaning too close now, smiling with all the confidence of a man who had never had to bury a friend in mud. Margaret answered him with a dry mouth and a colder gaze, yet she did not step away. Mary watched the exchange with the look of a woman standing beside an open flame and hoping the curtains did not catch.

Then Peter asked her to dance.

Tommy knew because her face changed.

Only a little.

The refusal came first. He saw that in her shoulders, in the set of her chin, in the hand that hovered near the glass as if work might still call her back if she reached for it. Then something loosened. A tired woman choosing one small bit of danger because the safer room had become unbearable.

She placed the glass down.

One song, he read from the movement of her lips.

John leaned near Tommy’s shoulder. “Told you.”

Tommy said nothing.

She danced better than Peter deserved.

That was his next thought, and it arrived with enough force to annoy him.

Margaret did not dance as if she wanted the room to admire her. She danced like someone remembering a body she had neglected. Her steps were careful at first, then surer. Peter turned her too quickly once and she corrected the movement with a look that made him laugh and lower his head as if apologising to royalty. Her skirt moved around her calves. Her cheeks took on a little colour from whiskey and heat.

Beautiful, Tommy thought.

The word came clean and unwelcome.

He had seen beautiful women before. He had had them look at him across pubs, parlours, betting rooms, racecourses. He had known beauty in expensive fabric and cheap perfume, in Irish green eyes behind a bar, in silk gloves hiding trembling fingers. Beauty rarely surprised him anymore. Men with money and violence saw too much of it offered at the wrong price.

This was different enough to disturb him.

Margaret Allen was beautiful in a way that seemed unbothered by whether he noticed. Green, tired eyes. A mouth too sharp to be sweet. A face shaped by grief before age had had the courtesy to get there first. She held herself together with pins and nerve, and Tommy knew, with the sudden certainty he trusted more than evidence, that if those pins were ever removed she would come apart silently.

That interested him.

Silence always did.

Peter spun her wrong.

She stepped back, heel catching against the uneven floor, and collided with John before she could fall. John steadied her by the elbow.

The room noticed because John was John.

Then the room noticed because Thomas Shelby moved.

He did not move far. He only stepped in behind his brother with Arthur on his left, and the noise nearest them thinned at once. Men looked into their glasses. A woman near the piano turned her head, then pretended to be invested in her cigarette. The piano player softened his hands over the keys, uncertain.

Margaret turned and saw John.

No fear first.

That made Tommy want to smile.

“Careful,” John said. “Didn’t want you falling.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she answered.

“And dancing with Peter from cleaning part of your plan?”

“You know Peter?”

She was quick. Not showy with her words. Not performing wit for approval. Her words came edged because she had learned somewhere that edges kept hands away.

Then John turned with a grin meant entirely to irritate. “Tommy, this is the London nurse.”

Margaret’s eyes came to him.

There it was.

The small, live thing in the air.

Tommy had felt it before in battle, though that was a poor comparison and he hated that his mind reached for France so quickly. He had felt it when a shell landed close enough to steal the sound from the world before the blast came rushing back. A pause. A charge. The body understanding before the mind had bothered with language.

She looked at him as if she knew he was dangerous and had decided danger was too common to impress her.

“The one from the station,” Tommy said.

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “The station has many people in it.”

John laughed under his breath. Arthur shifted beside Tommy, already disliking her because she had not lowered her gaze.

Tommy took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke leave slow.

“Not many arrive and insult my brother before tea.”

“I didn’t know he was your brother.”

“Would that have changed anything?”

“No.”

John enjoyed that too much. Arthur did not enjoy it at all.

“She’s got a tongue on her,” Arthur said.

Margaret looked at Arthur. “I was born with one.”

Tommy felt John go still. Felt the pub go still with him.

Arthur could take a joke when drunk, depending on the man making it and the hour of night. He did not like unfamiliar women making him feel stupid in his own pub. His anger had been too close to the surface since France and closer still since the business began growing beyond what Arthur could beat into obedience with his fists.

Tommy watched Margaret watch him.

She knew enough to understand Arthur was a threat. And she did not step back.

That was courage or exhaustion. Tommy suspected she had a great deal of both.

“You always answer back?” Arthur asked.

“When spoken to.”

“That’s answer enough.”

“Then you may stop speaking.”

Mary Doyle appeared at Margaret’s side, face bright with fear disguised as cheer. Peter lost colour. Harrison looked as if he wished the floor would open and take him before Arthur did.

Arthur took one step.

Tommy said his name.

“Arthur.”

A clear message of: Don’t do that.

Arthur stopped, breathing through his nose, jaw set like he had a knife between his teeth. Tommy did not look away from him until he stepped back. Family was a language. Arthur knew that tone. John knew it too, though John spent more of his life laughing at it.

Tommy turned back to Margaret.

She was looking at him now.

He liked that too much.

“You’re brave for someone new to Small Heath,” he said.

“I’m tired. People often mistake the two.”

There were phrases men brought back from France without knowing it. Little bits of truth wrapped in ordinary speech. Tommy heard one then. He saw it in her face too, in the guarded flicker after she spoke, as if she had given more than she meant to.

“Are you?” he asked.

“Am I what?”

“Tired.”

“Yes.”

“Then why come to the Garrison?”

There were several answers available to her. He could see them moving behind her eyes. Polite ones. Safe ones. A joke, perhaps. She had a talent for making a blade look like a hatpin.

She looked around the pub instead.

All the elements: Men, women,the piano player frozen over his keys. The room pretending not to listen to every breath between them.

“Because hospitals are full of the dying,” she said. “I wanted a room full of people pretending they aren’t.”

Something moved under Tommy’s ribs.

A trench board shifting in mud or a candle flame guttering inside a tunnel. Grace’s voice from an old room, singing while he tried to remember what quiet had felt like before guns learned his name.

He hated the precision of Margaret’s answer.

“You served,” he said.

“I nursed.”

“In France.”

“Yes.”

Before this night he had already known pieces already, her name, London, war, nurse, Birmingham City Hospital, boarding house run by Hodge two streets from the edge of Watery Lane, mother still alive in London, father gone, partner dead, Charles something… Tommy had not yet confirmed the surname, but he would.

He knew facts the way other men knew prayers.

Facts kept men alive.

Facts also told him this woman was lying every time she looked steady.

“Then you’ve earned your whiskey,” he said.

“I paid for it.”

“I didn’t say you hadn’t.”

There it was again. The spark.

No one else would call it that yet. John might later, if he had enough drink in him and the poor sense to say it aloud. Mary Doyle was already watching Tommy as if she wanted to pull Margaret behind the nearest wall and hide her from the whole Shelby family.

Smart woman, Mary Doyle.

He stepped to the bar and picked up Margaret’s glass.

The pub watched him take it to her.

He did it because he wanted to see whether she would accept something from his hand. Simple as that. Men told themselves stories about power. Tommy preferred experiments.

He held it out.

Margaret looked at the glass first, then at him. She understood the room. She understood an offer could be an order if made by the right man. Her fingers came up slowly, gloved, careful not to touch his.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Margaret.”

Her name suited her. Formal, clean, hard around the edges. A name that stood upright even when the woman wearing it had not slept.

“You know everyone around here?” she asked.

“Most.”

“And those you don’t?”

“I learn.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It has uses.”

“I imagine it does.”

She drank the whiskey in one go because she knew he was watching. Pride again flared in her eyes.

Also a want, perhaps, though too early for the word. Interest, certainly. On her side as well as his. There was an awareness in the way she held his gaze after the glass emptied. No simper. No invitation laid cheaply across the bar. She seemed almost angry with herself for not looking away first.

Tommy knew that feeling.

“Good evening, Mr. Shelby,” she said.

“Nurse Allen.”

Mary took her arm and led her out while there was still room to leave gracefully. Harrison followed with his head down. Peter trailed behind like a man grateful his face remained attached to his skull.

John watched the door shut behind them and whistled softly.

Arthur slammed his glass on the nearest table. “Fuck me, Tommy. She talks like that in here once more, I’ll—”

“You’ll do nothing,” Tommy said.

Arthur turned on him. “She made a mug of me.”

“You did that yourself.”

John laughed. “He’s right.”

“Shut up, John.”

John leaned against the bar, delighted and loose with it. “She told you to stop speaking.”

“I said shut up.”

“She told you very politely.”

Arthur lunged half a step, and John only grinned wider because brotherly stupidity did not know when to fear a punch. Tommy moved past them both.

“Private room,” he said.

The words ended the moment.

Arthur cursed, grabbed his drink of choice, and followed. John took one last look at the door Margaret had gone through before coming after them. Tommy noticed. Tommy noticed everything tonight, which annoyed him more than usual.

The private room behind the Garrison was quieter, though quiet in the Garrison always had noise pressed against the walls. Voices through wood. Piano starting up again with uncertain cheer. Glasses clinking. Men laughing harder now that the Shelby brothers had left the main room and allowed breath to return.

Tommy took his seat at the table. Arthur dropped heavily into a chair opposite him. John remained standing for a moment, restless, then sat sideways with one arm over the back.

On the table lay the business that had brought them here before Margaret Allen changed the temperature of the pub. Papers., names, figures, a map of London folded twice, a list of men who could be paid, and a shorter list of men who would need frightening before payment became an option.

Tommy lit another cigarette.

Arthur drank some more. “We talking about the London thing or John’s nurse?”

“She’s not my nurse,” John said.

Arthur scoffed. “You walked her from the station like a lost puppy.”

“She had a heavy suitcase.”

“Christ, he’s in love.”

John threw a matchstick at him. “Fuck off, I have a wife and too many kids to care about.”

Tommy looked at John through the smoke. “You told me she was difficult.”

“She is.”

“You failed to say she was clever.”

John shrugged, though his face betrayed him. “Thought you’d see that.”

“I did.”

Arthur leaned forward. “Can we not? She’s a nurse. London nurse. Mouthy as sin. Good for her. We’ve got business.”

Tommy tapped ash into the tray. “Then talk business.”

Arthur looked at the map as if he wanted it to confess on its own. “Camden man wants more money.”

“Camden man will get what we agreed.”

“They say London police aren’t like Birmingham police.”

“No,” Tommy said. “They’re more expensive.”

John leaned in now, boyish amusement settling into something sharper. “And Ada?”

The name sat heavier between the three brothers. Tommy’s eyes went to the map.

Ada was in London with Freddie and the baby, living in a kind of peace she had fought them all to get. Peace, Tommy had learned, was often only a room nobody had entered yet with muddy, heavy boots.

“We keep her away from it,” Arthur said at once.

John looked at him. “How?”

“By not doing business near her.”

“London isn’t a parlour, Arthur. We start moving there, people talk. People look for leverage.”

Arthur’s face hardened. “Nobody touches Ada.”

“No one touches Ada if we know they’re coming,” Tommy said.

The brothers went quiet.

Tommy unfolded the map fully and placed two fingers near Camden, then moved them south. “We don’t use her address. We don’t visit in groups. No Shelby cars on her street. No men waiting outside where neighbours can count caps and tell stories.”

Arthur shook his head. “She won’t like being watched.”

“She doesn’t need to like it.”

“She’ll know.”

“Probably.”

John rubbed his jaw. “Polly’ll have something to say.”

“Polly always has something to say.”

“And Freddie?”

Arthur’s lip curled. “Freddie can choke.”

Tommy’s voice stayed calm. “Freddie’s a father now. That changes where a man keeps his courage.”

Arthur made a dismissive sound, but he did not argue.

Tommy looked at John. “You speak to our man at Euston. Quietly. He gets eyes on movement in and out. No contact with Ada unless there’s danger.”

John nodded.

“Arthur, you speak to Camden again. Tell them the money stands. Tell them if they raise the price once more, I’ll assume it's been bought to waste my time.”

Arthur smiled for the first time that evening. “And if it has?”

“Then bring me a fucking name.”

That satisfied the older brother.

For several minutes, they worked. Routes mapped out, amount of money to be used, police to be bought, pubs they can buy, men who could be trusted because they feared the right things, men who could not be trusted because they liked hearing themselves speak. Tommy listened, adjusted, decided. The London business had to begin cleanly enough to look inevitable after the fact. No messy entrance. No unnecessary blood on the floor for newspapers to sniff at.

Still, part of him remained with the woman who had walked out of his pub with Mary Doyle’s hand around her arm.

Margaret Allen.

He did not like distractions.

He liked even less when a distraction presented itself as information he did not yet have.

Arthur noticed his silence first. Arthur was not stupid, despite what people took from his temper. He watched Tommy across the table and frowned.

“You still thinking about that nurse?”

Tommy turned a page. “Yes.”

John’s grin returned immediately. “Knew it.”

Arthur looked disgusted. “Why?”

“She works at the hospital.”

“So?”

“So hospitals hear things. Police wounds. Factory accidents. Men who talk under fever. Women who know who beat them and who paid for the doctor. Hospitals know more about this city than churches.”

John leaned back. “That why you’re thinking about her?”

Tommy looked at him.

John smiled because he knew the answer had teeth.

Arthur drank again. “She’ll be trouble.”

“Yes,” Tommy said.

There was no point denying that.

He could still see her in the smoke, chin lifted, whiskey burning down her throat. Too proud to flinch. Too tired to pretend innocence properly. Her beauty had caught him first, but beauty alone never held him. What held him was the way she spoke of dying people in a room full of drinkers and made the truth sound almost casual.

He wondered what Charles had been to her. Men left shapes behind when they died. Tommy knew that better than most. He wondered whether she slept with a photograph beside her bed. Wondered whether she woke reaching for cigarettes before she reached for prayer.

That thought irritated him.

It was too close to tenderness, and tenderness, for Tommy, had become a locked room since Grace took a ship to New York with his heart packed somewhere in her luggage.

Grace.

The name came less often now. When it came, it still cut clean. She had left the way people left when love was real but life had sharper teeth. New York had swallowed her. Or saved her. Tommy had never decided which version hurt less.

He had stopped waiting for letters he did not admit he wanted.

He had stopped imagining her voice in the Garrison.

Mostly.

Now a London nurse had walked in with war in her eyes and whiskey in her hand, and Tommy had felt something in himself stir awake like a thing he thought had died decently.

Arthur pushed his chair back. “I’m telling you, Tommy, keep John away from her. He gets daft around women with sharp mouths.”

John pointed at him. “I’m sitting right here.”

“Then hear it.”

“She’s not interested in me,” John said, with an honesty that surprised Tommy a little.

Arthur laughed. “That never stopped you before.”

John looked down at his drink, still smiling but quieter now. “She’s interesting, that’s all.”

“Boyish fascination,” Tommy said.

John looked at him. “And yours?”

Tommy held his brother’s gaze across the table.

The room seemed to still.

John, to his credit, did not look away. He had been a boy too long in many people’s minds. France had ruined that, fatherhood had changed it further, but John still carried a careless brightness around him when he could afford it. Tonight, that brightness had Margaret Allen’s shape.

Tommy leaned back. “Mine is my business.”

John’s mouth twitched. “Right.”

Arthur muttered, “Fucking hell.”

Tommy turned toward the door and raised his voice. “Jeremiah.”

A moment later, Jeremiah Jesus came in from the hall, hat in hand, eyes moving once across the brothers before settling on Tommy.

“Tom.”

“I need two men near Birmingham City Hospital. Different shifts, quiet. They watch the doors, the receiving entrance, anyone asking too much about staff.”

Jeremiah’s brows lifted slightly. “Trouble expected?”

“Trouble is always expected.”

Arthur watched him now, expression sharpening. “This about the London business?”

Tommy ignored the question. “Another man near Hodge’s boarding house. Across the street if possible. No standing under lamps like amateurs. No speaking to women going in or out. If Mary Doyle sees them, they move farther back.”

John sat up. “Tommy.”

Tommy looked at him. “What?”

“That’s where Margaret’s staying?”

“Yes.”

Arthur swore under his breath. “You already knew that?”

“I know where the nurses stay when they work in my city.”

“Your city,” Arthur said with mockery.

Tommy’s eyes stayed on Jeremiah. “No contact unless there’s need. If she’s followed, I hear. If trouble comes from Watery Lane toward that house, I hear. If police ask questions about her, I hear before the answer leaves anyone’s mouth.”

Jeremiah nodded slowly. “The girl from tonight?”

“Yes.”

John looked between them. His amusement had faded now, replaced by something more complicated. “She won’t like that.”

“She won’t know.”

“She’ll find out.”

Tommy took a drag from his cigarette. “Then I’ll hear about that too.”

Arthur shook his head. “You’ve lost your mind over a woman who told me to stop speaking.”

Tommy’s gaze cut to him. “You should have stopped sooner.”

John laughed once, despite the seriousness of the situation.

Arthur pointed at Tommy with his glass. “You want my opinion?”

“No.”

“You’re getting it.”

“No,” Tommy said again, firmer.

Arthur held the words in his mouth, then swallowed them with whiskey.

Jeremiah waited until the brothers’ silence settled. “Hospital and boarding house. Quiet men.”

“And good ones,” Tommy said. “No boys trying to impress anyone.”

“I’ll handle it.”

Jeremiah left.

The door shut behind him.

For a few seconds, only the muffled pub noise remained. The piano had found confidence again. Men sang badly. Life went on outside the private room because life always did, disrespectful as ever.

John was the first to speak.

“You protecting her because she’s useful or because she’s pretty?”

Tommy looked down at the map of London.

Margaret Allen was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. That was true enough to be useless. Beauty could be bought, stolen, married, ruined, buried. He had seen all of it. Protection did not come from beauty alone.

It came from interest.

And interest, once it took hold in Tommy Shelby, became action before most men had finished naming the feeling.

“She’s new,” he said.

Arthur snorted. “That’s your answer?”

“She’s new,” Tommy repeated. “She walked into the Garrison without knowing whose room she was entering. She works in a hospital that will see our men sooner or later. She lives close enough to Watery Lane for trouble to mistake her door.”

John studied him. “And?”

Tommy folded the map once.

“And I don’t like mistakes.”

Arthur leaned back with a laugh that held no humour. “Fuck me.”

John smiled into his drink. “She’ll eat you alive if she learns you put men outside her house.”

Tommy almost smiled.

He could imagine it. Margaret Allen at his door, tired eyes bright with anger, that London voice sharpened enough to open skin. He could imagine her calling him arrogant. Dangerous. Pleased with himself, perhaps, since she had already said it to John and seemed unlikely to waste a useful insult.

He found the thought more pleasant than wise.

“Then she’ll know where to find me,” Tommy said.

John shook his head, grinning now. “You do like her.”

Tommy’s eyes rose.

John’s grin softened, but he did not take it back.

Arthur missed the change. Arthur was still scowling at his glass, annoyed by London, women, business, and perhaps the entire arrangement of the modern world.

Tommy tapped ash into the tray and let his gaze drift toward the door.

Beyond it, the Garrison lived and smoked. Margaret Allen had gone back into the Birmingham night with Mary Doyle on one side and two harmless men behind her. She would return to the boarding house, he thought. She would likely write something down. Nurses did that. Women who survived things did that too, if they could bear having the truth in ink.

He wondered what she would write about him.

Then he wondered why he cared.

Grace had once told him there was a man inside him who wanted peace. She had said it like a promise. He had believed her because she had looked at him as if she could see that man clearly enough to call him out.

Then she left.

Peace, in Tommy’s experience, had poor staying power.

Margaret Allen had not looked at him as if she wanted to save him. That was the first sensible thing about her. She had looked at him as if she was deciding whether he deserved the inconvenience of her attention.

He liked that.

Arthur leaned over the table and dragged them back into business with a question about Camden. John argued. Tommy answered. Names moved. Money shifted. London waited.

But somewhere beneath the figures and routes, a new fact had placed itself in Tommy’s mind and refused to leave.

Margaret Allen.

A woman who told Arthur Shelby to stop speaking and drank from a glass Tommy Shelby placed in her hand.

He would learn the rest of her.

That was how interest became intention.

And intention, with Tommy, had always been the beginning of trouble.

W: DESCRIPTION OF INJURIES, GRIEF, MENTION OF THE GREAT WAR, PTSD, ANXIETY ATTACK, SMOKING, EARLY 20'S VIBES.

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CHAPTER 01 - GHOSTS THAT FOLLOW

The first thing Birmingham did was swallow me whole.

The station was not so much a building as a living thing with a filthy mouth. Steam breathed from the engines in great white clouds, rolling over the platform and dampening everything it touched. Men pushed through it with bags over their shoulders and newspapers tucked beneath their arms. Women gathered children by the collars. Porters shouted over the shriek of brakes. Somewhere close, a horse gave a miserable snort, and the smell of coal, wet wool, iron, and bodies pressed in on me with such force I stopped with one foot on the platform and one still inside the train.

Behind me, someone cleared his throat.

“Miss?”

I looked back. The coughing man from the compartment stood with his handkerchief crushed in one fist, his face grey around the mouth.

“Sorry,” I said, stepping down properly before I could hold up the queue of passengers any longer.

My suitcase nearly pulled my shoulder from its socket when I lifted it. I had packed as if I owned nothing, which was mostly true, and still it felt as heavy as a dead man. The handle bit through my glove. I shifted it from one hand to the other and moved with the crowd because there was little choice in the matter. Birmingham had no patience for a woman who needed a moment to gather herself.

The platform trembled beneath my boots.

That was what unsettled me first. London stations were loud, yes, and full of people rushing as though God himself had given them a schedule. But this place had a different sort of movement. Harder. Meaner at the edges. Everything seemed to scrape against everything else. Metal on metal. Voices on smoke. Boots against stone.

I made it as far as a pillar near the exit before I stopped again.

A boy ran past me carrying a crate of newspapers, his cap too big for his head, shouting something about King and country and another factory-strike somewhere north. A woman beside me cursed after him when he nearly took her ankle out. Two soldiers stood near the wall with their backs to the brick, one missing a hand, the other with half his face turned away from the world. Neither of them spoke.

I tried not to stare. Afraid of them being the ghosts inside my head. I looked for a sign instead. Any sign. Something pointing toward the street, the city, the hospital, a place where one could stand without being shoved aside by men who smelled of tobacco and rain.

There were signs, of course. Too many. None of them useful.

“Come on, Margaret,” I muttered under my breath.

My voice sounded small here.

I had the address written in my pocket. Birmingham City Hospital. I had read the letter so many times I could see the paper in my sleep, the black ink, the neat signature, the promise of work and lodging arrangements to be discussed upon arrival. It had seemed straightforward in London. Just one train, one station, a single hospital. A new life, if one was inclined toward dramatic thinking.

Standing in the middle of that platform with smoke dampening the hair at the nape of my neck, it felt rather less straightforward.

I set the suitcase down for a moment and reached into my coat pocket for the folded paper.

A shoulder knocked mine.

“Watch it,” a man snapped.

I looked up. “You walked into me.”

He turned, surprised perhaps that I had a voice. His eyes moved over my coat, my hat, my suitcase, and the gloves I wore even though the day was not cold enough to justify them. Then his mouth twitched.

“London girl,” he said, as if it were an insult.

I lifted my chin. “Yes.”

He gave a short laugh and disappeared into the crowd.

I hated him at once., then hated myself a little for being glad he had guessed it so quickly, because at least someone seemed to know where I was from.

The paper had softened along the folds from too much handling. I smoothed it against my palm and looked down at the address again as though it might have changed since the last time.

Birmingham City Hospital.

Right.

I could ask someone for directions.

That was the sensible thing to do. Nurses were sensible by necessity. We asked for instruments before we needed them. We counted pulse, checked pupils, watched the colour drain from lips and learned to move before panic had a chance to enter the room. Asking a stranger for directions was hardly a battlefield procedure.

Still, my feet remained where they were.

There were too many men. Too many eyes. Too many ways for a simple question to become an invitation I had not meant to give. I had learned that in London before the war and learned it again in France, where a woman in uniform was either a saint, a mother, or something men thought they could grab if the pain was bad enough and the morphine had not come yet.

My thumb pressed against the inside of my wrist.

Steady.

I folded the paper and pushed it back into my pocket.

“Lost, are you?”

The voice came from my left. Male, young and amused in a way that immediately made me want to be difficult.

I turned.

He was leaning against the pillar as though he owned it. Flat cap pulled low. His coat was dark, with his hands in his pockets. Younger than I expected from the confidence in his voice, though not a boy. There was something quick about his face, something bright and restless in the eyes. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth unlit.

He looked at my suitcase, then at my gloves, then at my face.

I stared back. “No.”

His mouth curved. “No?”

“No.”

“You’re standing in the middle of the station reading the same bit of paper like it owes you money.”

“I enjoy reading.”

“At a train station?”

“It’s a thrilling hobby.”

That made him laugh. A real laugh, short and warm, and I found that more irritating than if he had sneered.

He pushed himself off the pillar. “Where you headed?”

“I’m perfectly capable of finding my way.”

“Didn’t say you weren’t.”

“You implied it.” I went in completely defensive.

“I implied you looked lost.”

“I am not.”

His eyes flicked toward the exit, then back to me. “Right. Then you’ll be wanting that way.”

He pointed with his chin toward a passage half-hidden behind a knot of passengers and porters.

I looked despite myself.

His grin widened.

Damn him.

I picked up my suitcase again. The handle had warmed where my palm had been. “Thank you.”

“That all you’re carrying?”

“Yes.”

“Moving light.”

“Moving privately.”

Another laugh, softer this time. “Fair enough.”

I started toward the passage without waiting for him to say anything else. If I walked with enough purpose, perhaps Birmingham would be fooled into thinking I belonged to it already.

I managed six steps before he fell into stride beside me.

I stopped. “Are you following me?”

“Walking the same way.”

“Convenient.”

“It is, yeah.”

I studied him properly then. He had that look men in rough districts often wore after the war, whether they’d gone to France or only watched others come back from it. A face trained to make a joke before anyone noticed the bruising. Not actual bruising in his case, though there was a small healing cut near his brow and a faint swelling along one knuckle. His coat was good enough to mean money of some kind, worn carelessly enough to mean he did not have to beg for it.

“Do you make a habit of approaching women at stations?” I asked.

“Only ones who look ready to stab somebody with a hatpin.”

“I don’t own a hatpin sharp enough.”

“Pity.”

“I could improvise.”

He looked pleased by that, which told me he was either foolish or very used to women threatening him.

“John,” he said.

I did not answer.

He waited a second. “That’s usually where you tell me your name.”

“Is it?”

“In polite places, I hear that’s how it goes.”

“This is a polite place?”

He glanced around the station: the shouting men, the crying baby, the porter arguing over a trunk, the blackened glass overhead. “No. Suppose not.”

I began walking again.

He kept pace as if my refusal had been an invitation written in gold.

“I know the city,” he said. “You don’t.”

“You’ve gathered that from my accent?”

“That and the way you’re looking at everything like it might bite.”

“Will it?”

“Some of it.”

I hated that I wanted to ask which parts.

We reached the main concourse where the crowd widened and split toward the exits. A gust of colder air rolled through whenever the doors opened, carrying the stink of horses and smoke from the street beyond. I could see it now, Birmingham proper, waiting outside with its soot-dark buildings and narrow faces. The sky above the station was the colour of dirty dishwater.

John nodded toward my suitcase. “Hospital?”

I stopped again.

His expression changed before he could hide it. Only a little, but enough. His teasing eased back., and his gaze went to the cuff of my coat, where the sleeve had shifted and shown a glimpse of white beneath.

Nurse’s uniform.

He had not guessed. He had seen.

“That obvious?” I asked.

“Not to everyone.”

“Then you’ve had practice.”

His jaw moved once, like he had bitten down on a thought. “Birmingham’s got plenty of need for nurses.”

“Everywhere does.”

“Aye.”

Something passed through his face then, too fast to name. France, perhaps. Or a room where someone had died badly and no one had known what to do with the blood.

I had seen that look in London. In train compartments, or in pubs, on men who laughed too loudly and women who flinched at dropped plates.

The war had ended, according to newspapers.

No one had informed England.

“I need Birmingham City Hospital,” I said, because it was easier than standing there with the ghosts between us.

John nodded. “I can show you.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“I know.”

“I don’t take walks with strange men.”

“Good. You shouldn’t.”

“And yet.”

“And yet I’m going that way, and you’ve got a suitcase that looks heavier than you.”

“It is not.”

“It is.”

“I carried wounded men heavier than this.”

The words came out sharper than I intended.

John’s face stilled. He did not make a joke, and that was something, at least.

“Then you can carry it,” he said quietly. “And I’ll walk beside you so nobody bothers you.”

I looked at him.

He held my gaze without pushing. There was no noble look on his face, no grand display of gentlemanly sacrifice. He seemed, if anything, mildly uncomfortable with having said something decent.

I let out a slow breath through my nose. “Fine.”

His grin came back, though smaller. “Fine?”

“You may walk beside me.”

“Generous.”

“You may also refrain from speaking.”

“That’ll be harder.”

“I suspected as much.”

We stepped out of the station into Birmingham.

The city hit me with both hands.

London had fog, but this was different. This was industry thick enough to taste. Smoke dragged low between buildings and clung to window ledges, faces, washing lines, the backs of horses. The street outside the station was churned with mud and black water. Carts moved alongside motorcars, boys darted through gaps with the desperate confidence of children who had learned early that wheels rarely stopped for them. Men in caps stood in clusters outside shops and public houses, smoking, watching, saying very little.

Everything looked as if it had been rubbed with coal.

John noticed me taking it in. “Welcome to Birmingham.”

“It’s cheerful.”

“That’s the sunniest bit.”

“Splendid.”

He laughed again and moved to the outside of the pavement, closer to the road. I noticed that without wanting to. Men did that sometimes when they wished to appear protective. Men did it sometimes because they understood roads better than women’s fear. John did it with the distracted ease of someone who had been taught by women and trouble.

“You’ll want to learn the streets quick,” he said. “Main ones first. Don’t cut through alleys unless you know where they come out.”

“I’m from London, Mr. John. Alleys are not a Birmingham invention.”

“No, but ours have more personality.”

“By personality, do you mean knives?”

“Sometimes.”

I glanced at him.

He smiled around the unlit cigarette. “Sometimes fists. Depends on the day.”

“Useful distinction.”

“You’ll also want to keep your bag close in the markets. Don’t look too interested in anything unless you want the price doubled. And if a man offers to carry that for a penny, he’ll run with it before you’ve finished saying thank you.”

“I would never pay a stranger to steal from me.”

“You’d be surprised how many do.”

We passed a row of shops with grimy windows. A butcher was hosing blood from the front step into the gutter. A girl no older than twelve stood outside with a basket over one arm, her cheeks red from the wind, watching us with open curiosity. Across the street, a man came out of a public house though it was barely afternoon. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette with hands that shook worse than mine.

I looked away before he caught me seeing him.

The suitcase pulled at my arm again. I adjusted my grip.

John noticed. Of course he did.

“You sure you don’t want me to take it?”

“Quite sure.”

“You’re stubborn.”

“And you’re observant.”

“My aunt says that as though it’s an illness.”

“She may be right.”

That earned a quick look from him, amused and bright. “You talk posh, but you’ve got a bite.”

“I’ll write to my mother. She’ll be relieved.”

“She worried about you coming here?”

“Everyone is worried about everything nowadays.”

“That’s true enough.”

A cart rolled past close enough to splash dirty water over the hem of my coat. I stepped back too late and looked down at the black spots blooming in the wool.

John winced. “There’s your first bit of Birmingham.”

“I shall treasure it.”

“Don’t worry. By next week the whole coat’ll match.”

“Comforting.”

He pointed ahead with two fingers. “Hospital’s past there. Another few streets.”

I followed the line of his hand and saw taller buildings rising beyond the roofs. Red brick with long windows and a shape that looked stern even from a distance.

Something inside me tightened.

Not panic this time, though panic stood nearby, waiting for permission. This was the edge of arriving. The last few minutes before a person became whoever she had claimed she was going to be.

A nurse, twenty-three years of age, and somehow capable.

My throat went dry.

John slowed half a step. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“That was quick.”

“What was?”

“You saying fine before I’d properly asked.”

I looked at him. “Do people in Birmingham make a habit of examining every word?”

“Only when they’re interesting.”

“I’m not interesting.”

“You’re a London nurse with war medals, a suitcase, and a temper. That’s interesting enough.”

I stopped walking and he stopped too, a few feet ahead, then turned back.

“I didn’t say medals,” I said.

“You did at the station.”

“No. I said I carried wounded men.”

He looked at me for a second, and there it was again, that flicker of something more careful beneath the grin.

“Your posture said the rest.”

“My posture?”

“Yeah.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard today.”

“You stand like a soldier pretending not to be one.”

I had no answer for that.

A woman pushed past us with a basket of laundry, muttering about fools blocking the path. I moved aside automatically, cheeks warming in the cold air. John waited until she had gone.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.

People always said that after meaning enough.

I started walking again. “I trained as a nurse during the war. That’s all.”

“That’s not all.”

“It is all I’m telling you.”

He nodded. “Fair.”

We continued in silence for a while.

I preferred him that way, or told myself I did. It gave me room to listen to the city: Hooves, wheels, a factory whistle in the distance, a baby crying somewhere behind a closed door. The low rumble of men coming out of a building in work clothes, shoulders bent from labour and lungs filled with whatever made this city rich enough for some and hungry enough for the rest.

There were women everywhere too. Women with cracked hands and tired backs. Women in dark coats holding children by the wrist. Women who looked at me and saw the stranger in my boots, my London coat, my suitcase. Some glanced away. Some did not.

The hospital grew larger with each street.

By the time we reached the gates, my hand ached from the suitcase handle and my lungs felt lined with soot.

Birmingham City Hospital stood behind iron railings, broad and severe, its brick darkened by weather and smoke. The windows were tall, many of them open a crack despite the cold. Somewhere inside, a bell rang. A motor ambulance waited near the entrance, its paint scratched, one wheel splashed with mud. Two orderlies carried a stretcher through the doors at a brisk walk. The patient on it was covered to the chest with a grey blanket, one hand dangling over the side.

The sight steadied me more than anything else had.

A hospital was a hospital. Even an unfamiliar one.

Blood had the same smell in Birmingham. Pain made the same sounds. Fever flushed skin the same way. A frightened man was a frightened man no matter the city.

I could work with that.

John watched me instead of the building. “You’ve got that look again.”

“What look?”

“Like you’re about to fight it.”

“Perhaps I am.”

“The hospital?”

“The future.”

He looked at the building then. His expression softened in a way that made him look younger for half a second. “Well, give it a hard one for me.”

Despite myself, I smiled.

It surprised us both.

John pointed at the main doors. “Ask for the matron when you get in. If she scares you, don’t show it.”

“Does she scare you?”

“I avoid hospitals when I can.”

“That’s usually what men say before turning up half-dead and bleeding on the floor.”

“Then you’ll see me soon enough.”

“I hope not.”

He tapped the side of his cap. “That almost sounded kind.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Course.”

I shifted the suitcase to my other hand and looked at him properly. “Name’s Margaret. Thank you for walking me.”

“You’re welcome, Margaret.” He replied grinning.

“Mr. John,” I said slowly, “are you always this pleased with yourself?”

“Most days.”

“That must be exhausting for everyone around you.”

“My brothers say worse.”

“Then your brothers sound sensible.”

He scoffed “That’d be news to them.”

A shout came from farther down the street. John turned his head toward it, attention catching like a match strike. For the first time since he had appeared beside that pillar, I saw the restlessness in him sharpen into something harder. Recognition, perhaps. Duty, or trouble calling a familiar name.

He looked back at me.

“You’ll be all right from here?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“I’m standing in front of a hospital, not the mouth of hell.”

“You haven’t met the matron yet.”

“I have survived surgeons with God complexes and soldiers biting through leather straps. I can manage a matron.”

His smile returned, quieter now. “I believe you.”

I was not used to strangers believing me.

He stepped back from the gate. “Careful in the city, Margaret.”

Before I could say something else, he nodded once and began walking backward down the pavement, hands in his pockets again.

“Welcome to Birmingham.” John said over his shoulder and disappeared into the moving street as if the city had folded around him.

I stood by the gate for a few seconds after he left.

The iron was cold beneath my gloved hand when I touched it. Behind me, Birmingham went on shouting. Ahead of me, the hospital waited with its tall windows and open doors. I felt suddenly aware of my coat hem stained with street water, my hair loosened by the walk, my mouth dry from nerves and cigarette smoke.

I wanted to light another one.

Instead I lifted my suitcase and walked through the gates.

Inside, the air changed.

The entrance hall smelled of carbolic soap, boiled linen, damp coats, and that sour scent of sickness. It was unpleasant enough to be comforting. My boots struck the tiled floor with a sound that seemed too loud at first. A clerk behind a desk looked up over his spectacles, took in my suitcase, then returned to his papers as though women carrying their whole lives through hospital doors were a daily inconvenience.

Perhaps they were.

“I’m here to report for nursing staff,” I said.

He did not look up. “Name?”

“Margaret Allen.”

He dipped his pen into ink. “From London?”

“Yes.”

“Matron’s expecting you.”

The word matron landed with more weight than it had outside.

The clerk pointed down the corridor without lifting his head. “Straight through. First left. Office at the end. Don’t wander.”

“I wasn’t planning on sightseeing.”

That made his pen pause. Only for a moment.

Then he wrote something down. “First left.”

I followed his directions.

The hospital corridors were wide but busy. Nurses passed in pairs, aprons clean, faces set in that particular expression women wore when they had too much to do and no intention of being interrupted by men pretending urgency was competence. A porter carried a stack of folded blankets high enough to hide his face. Somewhere beyond the walls came the sharp cry of a child, followed by a woman’s soothing voice. A bell rang twice.

My shoulders loosened one inch.

Work had a rhythm and rules. Even chaos behaved differently in a hospital than it did on a train platform. People could still die, and often did, but there were basins, charts, bandages, routines. Pain could be given a name and written in ink.

At the end of the corridor, a frosted glass door bore painted letters.

MATRON E. HAWTHORNE.

I set the suitcase down, smoothed my coat, and knocked.

“Come in.”

The voice on the other side was crisp enough to cut bread.

I entered.

Matron Hawthorne stood behind her desk rather than sitting at it. She was tall, narrow, and built from discipline. Her grey hair was pinned beneath her cap with military precision, and her uniform looked so exact it seemed less worn than enforced. She held my letter in one hand.

“Miss Allen.”

“Yes, Matron.”

Her eyes moved over me with swift assessment. Coat. Gloves. Boots. Face. She missed nothing, which meant I disliked and respected her within the same breath.

“You’re late.”

I glanced at the clock on the wall. “By seven minutes.”

“Late is not measured by how much one prefers it to be excused.”

“No, Matron.”

A silence. Then her mouth twitched so faintly I wondered if I had imagined it.

“Your train?”

“Crowded.”

“They usually are.”

“Yes, Matron.”

She set the letter down and lifted another sheet. “You served in France.”

“I trained in London first, then volunteered with a medical unit attached to casualty clearing work.”

“I did not ask for modesty, Miss Allen. I asked for confirmation.”

I held her gaze. “Yes, Matron. I served in France.”

“Experience with surgical cases?”

“Yes.”

“Amputations?”

“Yes.”

“Gas injuries?”

“Yes.”

“Abdominal trauma?”

My fingers tightened inside my gloves. “Yes.”

“Shell shock?”

The room grew smaller for half a second.

“Yes.”

She watched me closely.

I gave her nothing else.

Matron Hawthorne nodded once and placed the sheet on her desk. “Then you will find Birmingham less dramatic and more relentless. We have industrial injuries, infections, births, beatings, burns, men who drink away their wages and women who pay the consequence. We have children with lungs ruined before they learn to read. We have former soldiers who will not call themselves patients until they collapse in the street.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. But you will.”

Fair enough.

She moved around the desk and opened the door. “Your lodging has been arranged temporarily at a nurses’ boarding house two streets over. Respectable enough. Cold in the mornings. You’ll be given directions after supper. Until then, you’ll meet the staff, receive your schedule, and change into uniform.”

“I start today?”

“You arrived today.”

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant. We are short-staffed.”

Of course they were.

Every hospital in England had been short-staffed since the war, and before that too, though men only noticed shortages when they were the ones needing care.

Matron Hawthorne stepped into the corridor, and I followed with my suitcase.

“You’ll begin on women’s surgical for the remainder of the afternoon. Tomorrow you’ll rotate through receiving. After that, we’ll see where you’re useful.”

Useful.

I liked the word more than I should have.

She led me down another corridor and into a small room where two nurses stood near a cupboard, arguing in low voices over a missing apron.

One of them was tall and fair, with a sharp chin and tired blue eyes. The other was shorter, dark-haired, with a rounder face and a mouth that looked as if it smiled often despite the hospital’s best attempts to prevent it.

Both turned when we entered.

“Nurse Clarke,” Matron said. “Nurse Doyle. This is Nurse Allen from London. She’ll be joining us.”

The fair one, Nurse Clarke, looked me over without warmth and without cruelty. A practical assessment.

The dark-haired one smiled at once.

“London?” she said. “Well, that’s fancy.”

“Mary,” Matron warned.

“What? I’m welcoming.”

“You are commenting.”

“That too.”

Nurse Clarke stepped forward and gave me a small nod. “Edith Clarke.”

“Margaret Allen.”

Her handshake was dry and firm.

Nurse Doyle took my hand next with both of hers, warmer than expected. “Mary. Don’t mind Edith’s face. She was born disappointed.”

Edith sighed. “I was born quiet. You mistake the two because you’ve never tried it.”

Mary looked at me. “See? Friendly already.”

A laugh almost left me. It caught somewhere near my ribs and turned into a breath instead.

Matron Hawthorne pointed to the cupboard. “Find Nurse Allen an official uniform and show her where to change. She’ll be on women’s surgical.”

Mary’s brows lifted. “Today?”

“She has experience.”

Edith looked at me again, this time more directly. “War?”

“Yes.”

Something shifted in her face. Recognition without pity.

Mary’s smile softened but did not disappear. “Right then. We’ll keep the worst of ourselves hidden until tomorrow.”

“Speak for yourself,” Edith said.

Matron Hawthorne gave them both a look capable of sterilising instruments. “I expect her on the ward in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, Matron,” they said together.

Matron turned to me. “Miss Allen.”

“Yes, Matron?”

“Birmingham does not reward softness. Do your work. Keep your head down. Ask when you don’t know. Don’t pretend around our patients.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.”

She left.

The room seemed to breathe again once she was gone.

Mary leaned closer to me and whispered, “She likes you.”

I looked toward the closed door. “That was liking me?”

“For her, yes.”

Edith opened a cupboard and moved a stack of linens. “She didn’t send you home crying. Practically a kiss on the cheek.”

“I can still hear you, Nurse Clarke,” Matron’s voice called from the corridor.

Edith closed her eyes.

Mary pressed her lips together so hard her whole face trembled.

Despite the ache in my arm, the soot in my lungs, and despite Charles folded somewhere inside my suitcase with my old life, I laughed.

Only once and quietly.

But it happened.

Mary looked delighted. Edith looked less disappointed than advertised.

“There she is,” Mary said. “We were beginning to worry London had sent us a statue.”

“I’m too tired to be made of stone.”

“That’ll fit in well here.”

Edith handed me a folded apron and pointed toward a screen in the corner. “You can change there. Keep your purse on you. Don’t leave cigarettes in the common room unless you mean to share.”

Mary gasped. “Edith Clarke, accusing nurses of theft?”

“I’m accusing nurses of being nurses.”

I set my suitcase down beside the screen. “I only smoke when my hands shake.”

The words came out before I had measured them.

Both women went a little quiet.

I hated the quiet more than I hated the mistake.

Then Mary reached into her own apron pocket and pulled out a cigarette case, scratched silver, clearly lived. She flipped it open, showed me three crooked cigarettes inside, and winked.

“Then you’ll never be without company.”

Edith shook her head, but there was something kind in the movement. “Change quickly. Women’s surgical waits for no one.”

I stepped behind the screen and began to unbutton my coat.

I folded my coat over the back of a chair and reached for the clean uniform. Changed fast. Women’s surgical smelled of boiled linen and old pain.

That was my first thought when Nurse Clarke pushed open the ward door with her hip and gestured for me to follow. There were sixteen beds, eight on each side, with narrow walkways between them and windows tall enough to let in a grey wash of afternoon light. The glass looked clean, which surprised me, until I noticed how the soot gathered thick around the frames where fingers could not easily reach.

A coal fire burned low at the far end. It gave off more smoke than warmth.

“Beds one through six are post-operative,” Edith said, walking with the brisk pace of a woman who did not waste steps. “Seven is waiting on Dr. Whitcomb to remember he’s got a patient with an abdomen hard as a board. Eight is Mrs. Barlow. You’ll know her because she shouts before she needs anything. Nine through thirteen are dressings, observation, infection watch. Fourteen is dying.”

She said the last part the same way one might say it was raining.

I looked toward bed fourteen before I could stop myself.

An older woman lay there with her face turned toward the window, cheeks hollow, skin stretched too thin over bone. Her breathing lifted the blanket in small, uneven movements. Beside her sat a girl of perhaps seventeen, twisting a handkerchief between red fingers.

“How long?” I asked quietly.

Edith paused near the medicine trolley. “Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning. Depends whether her heart is stubborn.”

“Is family informed?”

“The daughter knows. Sons haven’t come.”

There was a bitterness in her voice that made me wonder how many times she had said those words before.

Mary came in behind us carrying a tray with fresh bandages stacked high enough to hide the lower half of her face. “Mrs. Barlow threw a slipper at Dr. Whitcomb while you were gone.”

Edith did not look surprised. “Did she hit him?”

“Missed by inches.”

“Shame.”

Mary set the tray down and gave me a quick smile. “Welcome to women’s surgical.”

I thought of Matron Hawthorne’s words. Less dramatic and more relentless.

Already, I believed her.

There was no time for ceremony after that. No gentle introduction, no careful placement of the new nurse where she might watch before being trusted. Edith handed me a basin, Mary gave me a stack of clean cloths, and the afternoon opened its mouth.

I changed dressings on a woman with an infected incision below her ribs while Edith watched my hands for the first few moments, then moved away when she saw I knew what I was doing. The woman’s name was Clara Evans, twenty-eight years old, mother of four, husband working at one of the factories with a cough he refused to name. She apologized every time she winced.

“You don’t need to apologize for pain,” I told her, unwinding the old bandage slowly.

“I feel foolish.”

“Pain makes fools of everyone. You’re in good company.”

That made her smile for half a second before the dressing pulled at the dried edge and took the smile with it.

The wound was angry, red around the stitches with a thin seepage that had soaked the gauze yellow. I asked Mary for carbolic and kept my face steady as I cleaned it. Clara watched my expression more than my hands, as patients always did. They searched a nurse’s face for the truth doctors refused to give them.

“You’ve seen worse?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Am I meant to be comforted by that?”

“Only if it helps.”

She gave a small laugh, breathless. “Does it?”

“Sometimes.”

Mary looked at me over the tray, eyes softer than her mouth allowed.

After Clara came Mrs. Barlow, who had indeed been the slipper-thrower. She was a large woman with iron-grey hair, a sharp tongue, and an operation scar along her thigh that needed inspecting.

“You’re new,” she said the second I came near.

“Yes.”

“London?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. You’re pale enough.”

“I’ll try to develop a Birmingham complexion by supper.”

Mary coughed into her shoulder to hide a laugh.

Mrs. Barlow narrowed her eyes at me, then decided I would do. “That doctor’s a fool.”

“Many are.”

“You can say that?”

“I can think it.”

She barked a laugh loud enough for the woman in the next bed to stir. “Oh, I like this one.”

“She’s been here twenty minutes,” Edith said from the foot of another bed. “Don’t encourage her.”

The afternoon went on like that. Bed to bed. Name to name. Pain moving from one body to another until the ward became less a room and more a collection of small wars nobody wrote medals for.

A girl with burns along her forearm from a kitchen accident bit down on her lip until it bled while I changed the dressing. A seamstress recovering from a fever asked me twice if her employer had sent word, and when I told her no, her eyes turned to the ceiling. Mrs. Barlow complained about her tea. Clara Evans asked if infection meant she was dying, and I answered carefully because there were cruel ways to be honest and cowardly ways to be kind.

“No,” I told her, adjusting the blanket at her waist. “It means we watch it closely.”

“That’s what nurses say when they don’t know.”

“That is what nurses say when they intend to keep watching.”

She studied me with tired eyes. “You talk funny.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“London funny.”

“Tragic condition.”

That earned another small smile. I tucked it away as if I had done something useful.

Near four o’clock, Dr. Whitcomb appeared with a harassed expression and ink on his cuff. He was younger than I expected for the authority in his voice, perhaps late thirties, with thinning hair and the kind of confidence often given to men before competence had a chance to catch up. He examined bed seven, finally, and did not like what he found. The woman’s abdomen was rigid, skin shining with fever sweat, pulse too fast beneath my fingers.

“Prepare for theatre,” he said.

I moved before anyone told me to.

For a moment, the ward narrowed to the width of a stretcher and the sound of wheels rattling over tile. Mary went ahead to clear the corridor. Edith spoke to the patient in a low, firm voice while I helped secure the blanket around her. The woman gripped my wrist.

“Am I dying?” she whispered.

Her fingers were hot. Too hot.

“No,” Dr. Whitcomb said too quickly and too annoyingly from the foot of the bed.

I looked down at her. “You’re very ill, Mrs. Ellis. They’re taking you to surgery because waiting would be worse.”

Her eyes filled. “My boys—”

“We’ll send word,” Edith said.

Mrs. Ellis kept hold of my wrist until the doors to theatre took her.

Afterward, I stood in the corridor with the warmth of her hand still printed on my skin through my glove.

For a second I was back in France.

Canvas overhead. Mud beneath the boards. Men calling for mothers, wives, saints, water. A boy no older than seventeen catching my sleeve with half his hand gone, asking whether he would see Kent again. I had told him yes because he needed to hear it, and because I had been twenty-one and still foolish enough to believe God might forgive a lie told gently.

He died before morning.

“Margaret?”

Mary’s voice cut through before the memory could finish sinking its teeth into me.

I blinked.

The corridor came back. Brick walls. Hospital tiles. The smell of carbolic.

Mary stood beside me with an empty basin in her hands, her face no longer bright. “You with us?”

“Yes.” My voice sounded too flat. “Sorry.”

“No need.”

I flexed my fingers once. “What now?”

She looked at me for a second longer, then nodded toward the ward. “Now Mrs. Barlow wants to know why her tea is cold. Very serious matter.”

I followed her back.

By the time the afternoon began to loosen toward evening, my feet ached, my shoulders burned, and the clean white of my apron had taken on honest stains. Matron Hawthorne came through once, checked the ward, checked us, checked me with particular attention, and said nothing. Edith later informed me that silence from Matron after a first shift was practically applause.

I believed her only because Mary agreed.

At half past six, another nurse came to replace us. The ward settled into that strange evening quiet hospitals had, when pain did not lessen but became more private. Lamps were lit. Curtains were drawn around bed fourteen. The daughter still sat there, handkerchief twisted to threads.

I washed my hands longer than necessary.

Some blood came away first, then only soap, then nothing. But I kept scrubbing.

Mary leaned against the basin beside me. “You’ll take the skin off.”

I stopped.

My knuckles had gone pink.

“Bad habit,” I said.

“War habit?”

I reached for the towel. “A little, yeah.”

Mary did not argue, which I appreciated more than agreement.

Edith joined us in the small changing room, unpinning her cap with a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of her feet. “You did well.”

I glanced at her in the mirror. “That sounded painful.”

“It was.”

Mary grinned. “She means it, though. Edith doesn’t hand compliments out unless someone’s fever breaks or a doctor admits he’s wrong.”

“That ever happen?” I asked.

“Which one?”

“The doctor admitting he’s wrong.”

Mary pressed a hand to her chest. “We live in hope.”

Edith gave her a look. “Ignore her. She talks more when she’s hungry.”

“I talk the correct amount.”

“You talk enough for three wards.”

Mary turned to me. “See how cruel Birmingham makes a woman?”

I folded my apron carefully, buying myself a moment to enjoy them without showing it too openly. Their bickering had a rhythm worn smooth by familiarity. It made the room feel warmer than the small stove had managed.

Matron had said lodging would be at a nurses’ boarding house two streets over. I expected directions, perhaps a scribbled note with a map, and to be sent out into the dark with my suitcase and a stern reminder about punctuality.

Instead, Mary pulled on her coat and wrapped a knitted scarf twice around her neck. “I’ll walk you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“I can find it.”

“Probably. But you’re new, it’s getting dark, and Birmingham likes to introduce its rough self after sundown.”

Edith buttoned her own coat. “Let her walk you.”

I looked between them. “Is it that bad?”

Mary’s mouth tilted, though this time the smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Depends on the street.”

“Everything seems to depend on the street here.”

“That’s Birmingham.”

Edith took her gloves from the shelf. “And keep your cigarettes out of sight if you’re walking alone. Men will use any excuse to speak to you.”

“Men do that everywhere.”

“Yes, but here they’ll pretend it’s local charm.”

Mary laughed, then reached for my suitcase before I could stop her. “Come on. I know you can carry wounded men and your own luggage. Let me be useful before Edith calls me decorative.”

“I never called you decorative.”

“You thought it.”

“I thought noisy.”

“Same thing, in a nicer dress.”

I let Mary take the suitcase because my arm throbbed and pride was less useful than bone.

Outside, evening had settled over Birmingham with a blackened hand.

The lamps were lit along the street, their glow smeared by smoke and damp. Workmen moved in groups now, caps low, shoulders hunched against the cold. A woman dragged a child along by the sleeve while the child cried for bread. Somewhere down the road, a piano played badly through the open door of a public house, the notes staggering into the street as if drunk before any man inside had touched a glass.

Mary walked with purpose, suitcase in one hand, the other tucked into her coat pocket. She seemed smaller outside the hospital and somehow more alert. Her eyes moved constantly. Corners. Doorways. Men lingering near walls.

I noticed because I did the same.

“The boarding house is respectable,” she said. “Mrs. Hodge runs it. Widow, and sharp as a sewing needle. She’ll charge extra if you take hot water too often and scold you if you come in after ten, but she keeps clean sheets and doesn’t let men past the front room.”

“That’s better than London gave me.”

“She likes nurses. Her daughter died in the influenza. Had a nurse with her at the end.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mary nodded once. “Everyone is sorry for someone these days.”

We turned into a narrower street. The buildings leaned closer, their upper windows staring down with dark, blank faces. Washing hung between two houses, stiff in the cold. A group of boys scattered when Mary clicked her tongue at them, though one called something under his breath that made her stop and turn.

“Say it louder, Billy, and I’ll tell your mother where you hide the coins you nick off the bookies.”

The boy’s face went pale.

Mary kept walking.

I stared at her. “I’m beginning to think you’re dangerous.”

“Only to children and doctors.”

“That’s quite a range.”

She gave me a quick sideways smile, then her expression sobered as we approached another turn.

“Listen,” she said. “You’ll hear things about this part of the city. Half of it true, half of it told by men who like frightening women because it makes them feel tall.”

“I’m listening.”

“This isn’t the West End. It isn’t London respectable, either. People here mind their own business because their own business can get them killed if someone else minds it first.”

The street opened slightly ahead. More houses. More noise. A public house at the corner, windows glowing amber, men gathered outside with cigarettes and hard faces. One of them glanced at Mary, nodded once, then looked at me with interest.

Mary’s hand tightened on my suitcase handle.

“Watery Lane isn’t far,” she said quietly.

The name sounded familiar only because I had heard it in frightened versions of Birmingham before leaving London. My mother’s voice. Newspaper gossip. Women whispering while pretending not to enjoy the danger of it.

“That’s gang territory?” I asked.

Mary huffed a humourless laugh. “All of Birmingham is someone’s territory if you ask the right men.”

“And Watery Lane?”

“That belongs to the Shelbys.”

I looked at her. “Shelbys.”

“Family.”

“Criminals?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

“That sounds like an answer from someone who doesn’t wish to be overheard.”

Mary’s mouth pressed thin.

We passed the public house. The men outside stopped speaking for the few seconds it took us to walk by. I kept my gaze forward, though my skin prickled with the effort.

Once we were a little farther on, Mary spoke again.

“They run the betting, protection, pubs. Some factories fear them, some pay them, some do both at the same time. Men around here don’t say their names too loudly unless they’re friendly with them or too stupid to live long.”

I swallowed.

“Peaky Blinders,” she said, testing the name on my tongue.

The words landed with a strange quiet despite the noise around us.

I had heard the name, of course. Everyone had, in the way everyone heard names of men who became more story than flesh. Razor blades sewn into caps, men blinded in alleys, bookmaking, policemen paid to look the other way. My mother had said Birmingham was rough. She had said gangs as though the word itself might snatch me off the pavement.

I looked toward a narrow lane disappearing between rows of houses. A man stood there smoking beneath a lamp, cap pulled low enough to hide his eyes.

“And the hospital treats them?” I asked the real question that concerned me.

Mary gave me a look. “The hospital treats anyone bleeding enough to be brought through the door.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“No.”

We walked a few more steps.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Sometimes. Usually they’ve got their own people for smaller things. When it’s bad, they come to us. Or someone comes instead and pays in cash, asks no names, leaves before the constable can be fetched.”

“And Matron allows that?”

“Matron allows patients to live when she can manage it. She will only judge them afterward.”

I liked Matron Hawthorne a little more then.

Mary glanced at me, thoughtful. “You met one today, I think.”

“One what?”

“A Shelby.”

My feet slowed before I told them to.

Mary stopped with me beneath a streetlamp. Its weak light caught in the damp air between us.

“What do you mean?”

She adjusted the suitcase in her grip. “Word moves fast if you know who to hear it from. One of the porters said John Shelby walked some new London nurse to the hospital gates this afternoon. I thought he was making it up until I saw you.”

John.

Flat cap with a restless grin, hands in pockets… The way men had looked toward him in the street without quite looking at him.

My stomach tightened.

“He said his name was John.”

“Then he was feeling honest.”

“He didn’t say Shelby.”

Mary gave a small shrug. “They don’t need to.”

I looked back down the street as if he might appear there again, laughing at the fact that I had been walking beside danger and arguing with it about my suitcase.

“He didn’t do anything,” I said.

“I didn’t say he did.”

“He was... irritating.”

Mary’s lips twitched. “That sounds like John Shelby.”

“He walked me to the hospital.”

“That also sounds like John Shelby, if he liked you.”

“I don’t think he liked me.”

“Then he was bored.”

“That sounds more likely.”

Mary began walking again, slower now. “John’s one of the younger brothers. Arthur’s worse when he’s drunk, which is often enough. Tommy’s the one you keep your head down for.”

“Tommy.”

“Thomas Shelby.”

There it was. The name beneath the name. Spoken lower.

Even the smoke seemed to lean in.

“He owns the streets?” I asked.

Mary looked ahead. “He owns enough of the men walking them.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“It’s the safer answer.”

I did not like that, but also understood it.

A group of boys ran past us, laughing too loudly, chased by another boy carrying half a loaf of bread. Life went on around the warning as if warnings were ordinary weather. Perhaps here they were.

Mary stopped outside a narrow brick house with lace curtains in the front window and a brass knocker polished to a dull shine. A small sign near the door read MRS. HODGE — ROOMS.

“This is you.”

The house looked better than I had expected. Tired, but clean. The step had been scrubbed. A potted plant sat by the door with more determination than health.

Mary set my suitcase down. “Mrs. Hodge’ll give you a room on the second floor if Matron wrote ahead proper.”

“Thank you for walking me.”

“You’ll learn the way quick.”

“I hope so.”

“You will.” She hesitated, then added, “And Margaret?”

It sounded strange hearing my name from her so soon. Kind, though. Practical kindness. The kind women offered one another without making a performance of it.

“Yes?”

“If you see Peaky Blinders in the hospital, treat them as patients. If you see them in the street, keep moving unless they speak to you first. If they do speak, answer plain. Don’t flirt unless you mean it, don’t insult them unless you’re ready for it to be remembered, and don’t ask questions about things that don’t want answering.”

I absorbed that slowly.

“What if I’ve already insulted one?”

Mary’s face changed. “Did you?”

“I may have been... brisk.”

“Brisk how?”

“I asked whether he made a habit of approaching women at stations. I also told him he was pleased with himself.”

Mary stared at me for one breath, then laughed so suddenly that a curtain twitched in the house next door.

I frowned. “That’s reassuring.”

“No, it is. Really.” She wiped the corner of her eye. “John’s survived worse than a London nurse calling him pleased with himself.”

“He now knows my name.”

“So they all do.”

“That’s unsettling.”

“Most things about them are.”

The door opened before either of us could say more.

A woman in her sixties stood inside with a candle in one hand and an expression sharp enough to make Matron Hawthorne seem warm. She wore a dark dress buttoned to the throat, hair pinned back, eyes pale and unsentimental.

“You must be Nurse Allen.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mrs. Hodge. Wipe your feet.”

I did.

Mary leaned toward me. “Supper is usually bread, stew if she’s feeling generous, judgment either way.”

“I can hear you, Mary Doyle,” Mrs. Hodge said.

Mary straightened. “Good evening, Mrs. Hodge.”

“Go home before your mother sends your brother looking.”

“God forbid.”

Mrs. Hodge looked at me. “Inside. Heat goes out when doors stand open.”

I picked up my suitcase and turned to Mary one last time. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Too early and in a terrible mood.”

“Something to look forward to.”

Mary smiled. “Welcome to Birmingham, Margaret.”

Then she was gone, scarf tucked high around her chin, disappearing into the smoky evening with the same quick steps she had used in the ward.

Mrs. Hodge shut the door behind me.

The boarding house smelled of boiled cabbage, furniture polish, and damp wool drying too close to the fire. A narrow staircase climbed along the wall. Somewhere above, floorboards creaked under careful feet. Voices murmured from a room to the right, women’s voices, tired and low. The house had that particular quiet of shared lodging, where every person tried to own a private grief behind thin walls.

Mrs. Hodge held out her hand. “Letter.”

I gave her the paper from Matron.

She read it with the candle held close, lips moving slightly. “Second floor. Back room. Washstand, bed, wardrobe, small desk. No gentlemen upstairs. No hot water after nine unless arranged. No spirits. Smoking out the window only. Supper in twenty minutes if you want it.”

“I do.”

“Rent is deducted through hospital arrangement. Anything broken, you pay.”

“Of course.”

She looked at my gloves. “You’ll be wanting sleep.”

It was not a question.

“I’ll be wanting many things.”

For the first time, Mrs. Hodge’s mouth moved in something near approval. “Most of us do. Come on.”

She led me up the stairs with slow, heavy steps, the candlelight trembling over wallpaper faded by years of coal smoke. On the first landing, a door opened and a young woman peered out, hair loose over one shoulder. She saw Mrs. Hodge and vanished again.

“Factory girl,” Mrs. Hodge said. “Night shifts sometimes. Don’t lend her money.”

“I hadn’t planned to.”

“Plans change when people cry.”

That, too, was fair.

My room sat at the back of the second floor.

Mrs. Hodge opened the door and stepped aside.

It was small. Smaller than the flat in London, though cleaner in certain ways. A narrow bed against one wall. A washstand with a chipped basin. A wardrobe with one crooked handle. A desk beneath the window, scarred with old ink marks and a burn in the corner where someone had left a candle too close. The curtains were thin, but washed. The blanket on the bed was grey and neatly folded.

The window looked out over the backs of houses and a strip of yard where laundry hung limp in the damp. Beyond the roofs, factory chimneys climbed into the evening sky.

No Charles. And specially, no bed with memories pressed into the mattress.

My chest tightened before I could prepare for it.

Mrs. Hodge placed the candle on the desk. “You’ll have quiet enough back here.”

“Thank you.”

She looked around the room as though checking that it had behaved in her absence. “Supper in twenty.”

Then she left, closing the door with a firm click.

I stood in the middle of the room and listened to the house settle around me.

A chair scraped somewhere below. Water moved through pipes. A woman coughed on the other side of the wall, a deep chest cough that made my nurse’s mind catalogue it before the rest of me could object. Outside, a cart rolled over uneven stones, wheels clattering until the sound faded into the distance.

I set my suitcase on the bed.

For a while, I did not open it.

Arriving felt different once nobody was watching. At the station, with John beside me, I could be sharp. At the hospital, with Edith and Mary and Matron measuring my usefulness, I could be capable. In this room, with only the candle and the soot-dark window for company, I was simply a woman with one suitcase and too many ghosts for the space allotted.

I removed my gloves finger by finger.

My hands were steady at first.

Then they were not.

The trembling started in the right hand, small enough to pretend away. Then the left joined it out of loyalty or spite. I flexed my fingers, pressed my palms flat against the lid of the suitcase, and waited.

“Stop,” I whispered.

They did not.

I reached for my cigarette case.

The metal was cool against my palm. Familiar. I opened the window before lighting one, as Mrs. Hodge had ordered. Cold air slid into the room and touched the sweat at the back of my neck. I struck the match on the side of the case. The flare of flame made the window glass show my reflection for a second.

Pale face. Dark eyes. Hair loosening from its pins. A nurse’s collar still fastened neatly at my throat as if neatness could hide exhaustion.

I inhaled.

Smoke burned its way down. The first pull always hurt a little after a long day. I liked that too much.

Below, someone laughed in the yard, then another voice told them to shut up.

I leaned my hip against the desk and smoked with the window open, watching Birmingham darken by degrees. The city did not soften at night. It only changed its weapons. Daylight had shown brick and smoke, carts and men with caps pulled low. Darkness brought lamps, shadows, footsteps that seemed to pause too long beneath windows.

Somewhere far off, a whistle blew.

My throat closed.

For a moment, it was not a factory whistle. It was the warning before wounded came in. It was someone shouting for stretchers. It was rain hammering canvas overhead while I tried to find the clamp with hands slick from blood.

I took another drag, held it until my lungs protested, then exhaled toward the open window.

“Birmingham,” I said softly, as if naming the place might keep it from becoming France.

The cigarette shortened between my fingers.

When I finally unpacked, I did it carefully.

Dresses first. Two dark ones for workdays when I did not need uniform, one better dress my mother insisted I bring despite the fact that I had nowhere to wear it. Stockings. Undergarments. Hairpins tucked in a small tin. My nursing books, worn at the corners. Bandage scissors wrapped in cloth. A fountain pen Charles had given me for my nineteenth birthday, the nib slightly bent from the day I dropped it on a floor after receiving news that three men from his regiment had been killed.

Then the photograph.

Charles stood stiff in uniform, chin lifted, eyes trying for brave and landing somewhere near frightened. He had hated that photograph because he thought it made his ears look too large. I loved it because he looked alive in it. Annoyed, nervous, proud, impatient to be done posing so he could take me for tea we could not really afford.

I sat on the bed with the photograph in my lap.

The mattress dipped beneath me with a tired spring.

“You’d hate it here,” I said.

The room gave no answer.

I traced the edge of the photograph with my thumb, careful not to touch his face. “Too much smoke. You’d complain about your collar. Then you’d pretend to like it because I’d tell you to stop being soft.”

My mouth moved around a smile that never fully arrived.

The worst part of grief, I had found, was how much of love became habit. The turning to share a thought, or the listening for a key in the door. Even saving of a piece of bread because he always got hungry at impossible hours. My mind still made room for him before remembering there was no body to fill it.

A knock sounded below. Mrs. Hodge calling names.

I placed Charles’s photograph on the desk, propped against my books, and went down before the room could pull me too far under.

Supper was thin stew, bread hard at the edges, and tea strong enough to stand a spoon in. Four other women sat around the table. Two nurses I did not know, one factory girl with hollow cheeks, and an older woman who worked in laundry and said little except to ask for the salt.

Mrs. Hodge presided over the meal as if commanding a military post.

No one asked me too many questions once they learned I had come from London. That was a mercy. One of the nurses, a red-haired girl called Annie, asked which ward I had been put on. When I answered women’s surgical, she made a sympathetic noise and said Mrs. Barlow once called a vicar useless to his face.

“That was one of her kinder days,” the other nurse said.

The factory girl ate quickly, eyes lowered, one hand curled protectively around her bread. I noticed bruising along her wrist when her sleeve slipped back. Old. Yellowing.

Nurse habit, I told myself.

Human habit, something else answered.

After supper, I returned upstairs with a cup of hot water Mrs. Hodge allowed me “because it’s the first night and I’ve not yet learned whether you’re wasteful.” I washed in the basin, changed into my nightdress, and hung my uniform where the worst creases might fall out by morning. My body was tired enough to ache in separate pieces. Feet. Back. Neck. The place between my shoulder blades where grief liked to sit when it wanted to feel physical.

Sleep should have come easily.

It did not.

I lay in the narrow bed with the blanket pulled to my chin, staring at the ceiling while the house quieted around me. Floorboards groaned. A door clicked shut. Someone whispered goodnight through the wall. The sounds were ordinary, which made no difference.

My body did not trust night.

It had learned too much in France.

Night was when the wounded came in blue-lipped and shaking. Night was when shells found hospitals because smoke and lamps gave positions away. Night was when men died calling for women who could not hear them. Night was when my own mind, deprived of daylight tasks, dragged every memory from its corner and set it beside me in bed.

I turned onto my side.

The blanket scratched my cheek.

Charles watched from the desk, his photograph dim in the candlelight.

“I’m trying,” I whispered to him.

The window rattled as I closed my eyes.

For a few minutes, perhaps longer, I drifted somewhere shallow. Then a crack split the distance outside.

My eyes flew open.

A gunshot.

Far away. Somewhere beyond the houses. One shot first. Then a second. Then shouting, thin and carried by the night.

I was out of bed before I knew I had moved.

My bare feet hit the cold floor. My hand went to the wall, searching for a basin, a lamp, an instrument tray that was not there. My heart slammed once, twice, too hard. The room tilted.

France.

No.

Birmingham.

The shouting outside grew louder, then broke into laughter or anger, I could not tell which. A man cursed. Something smashed. Another voice roared back.

My breath came wrong.

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

The wall beneath my other palm was wallpaper, peeling slightly under my fingers. The floor was wood. The air smelled of coal and candle smoke, not mud and chloride and open bodies.

Still, my knees nearly gave.

I fumbled for the cigarette case on the desk and knocked my pen to the floor. It rolled beneath the chair. I did not bother reaching for it. My fingers were clumsy with the match. The first one snapped, a second scraped uselessly. The third caught, flame trembling so violently I nearly burned myself before getting the cigarette lit.

I stood at the open window in my nightdress and smoked as if it were medicine.

The street behind the house was dim, shadows layered over roofs and laundry lines. I could not see whoever had fired. I could hear men somewhere to the left, voices rough with drink or rage. Then came the sound of running feet. A door slammed. A woman shouted from a window for them to take their bloody business elsewhere.

Bloody business.

Mary’s voice returned to me.

Watery Lane just down the street.

Peaky Blinders.

John Shelby’s grin appeared next. That careless tilt of his head. The way he had known the streets belonged to someone and still walked through them as if ownership were a coat he could shrug on or off depending on the weather.

I had met a gangster at the station and argued with him about luggage.

That should have frightened me more than it did.

Perhaps fear was too crowded in me already.

I smoked halfway through the cigarette before my breath began to obey.

On the desk, my journal waited beneath Charles’s photograph. Brown leather with worn spine and pages inside filled with years I sometimes wished I could tear out and years I feared forgetting if I did. I had begun it when I was sixteen because my mother said a young woman should keep her thoughts orderly. The war had made a mockery of order, but I kept writing all the same.

I sat at the desk and opened it to the next clean page.

The pen was still under the chair.

I crouched to retrieve it and had to pause there, one hand gripping the seat, because another shout outside made my stomach drop. No gunshot followed. Only drunken laughter fading away.

I returned to the chair and uncapped the pen.

For a moment, I did not know what to write.

Then I wrote the date.

March, 1921. Birmingham.

The ink looked too black on the page.

I wrote slowly at first.

I arrived today with one suitcase and all the confidence I could afford to pretend. The city is darker than London. Rougher in the mouth. Smoke gets everywhere. The hospital is better than I feared and worse than I hoped, which is likely true of most places worth staying.

I paused, listening.

The house remained quiet.

I continued.

Met Matron Hawthorne. Severe woman. Clever eyes. I think she could make a surgeon cry if given the proper motivation. Nurse Edith Clarke is sensible and dry. Nurse Mary Doyle laughs as though she has decided the world is absurd and she refuses to let it win. I like them both already, which is inconvenient.

My cigarette had burned down near my fingers. I crushed it in the saucer Mrs. Hodge had left on the sill, then rubbed ash from my thumb.

I hesitated before writing the next part.

A man called John walked me from the station. John Shelby, according to Mary. Peaky Blinder. I did not know. He was irritating, amused, and kinder than I expected from a stranger. I may have insulted him. He did not seem wounded.

The pen hovered.

I should have left it there.

Instead, I wrote Charles’s name.

Charles would have laughed at me for getting lost before leaving the station. He would have carried my suitcase even if I told him not to. He would have hated Birmingham’s smoke and loved Mary within five minutes. He would have called John trouble. He would have been right.

The ink blurred.

I blinked hard, angry with my own eyes.

My grief had become less theatrical with time. That was what made it dangerous. In the beginning it had come like weather, loud enough that people could see it on me and step aside. Now it waited in ordinary places. A suitcase handle. A hospital smell. Some stranger offering to walk beside me. Thin stew at a boarding house table. A joke I wanted to tell a dead man.

I pressed my fingers beneath my eyes until the tears retreated.

“I’m not doing this tonight,” I whispered.

Of course, saying that never stopped anything.

I turned the page in my journal to an older entry without meaning to. The paper fell open where it had been opened many times before.

April, 1918.

Rain through canvas again. Took in twenty-three before dawn. Three abdominal, six gas, too many limbs to count properly. Sister Agnes slapped Private Warren when he tried to stand with his femur in pieces. I laughed afterward and then vomited behind the tent. Charles’s letter came, muddy at the corner. He says he dreams of toast with too much butter. I dreamed last night I could hear him calling from one of the stretchers and could not find him.

I shut the journal.

Too late.

My mind had already found the tent.

The candle flame leaned in a draft. Shadows moved over the walls. For a moment, the washstand became an instrument table. The blanket at the end of the bed became a stretcher. The dark coat hanging from the wardrobe became a man standing in the corner with half his face gone.

I stood so quickly the chair scraped the floor.

Breathe.

The word was useless. Breathing was the problem.

I crossed to the basin and splashed cold water over my face. Once. Twice. The shock brought me back in pieces. My hands gripping porcelain. My hair falling loose. The floor cold enough to sting. Birmingham outside the window. Charles on the desk. The cigarette taste in my mouth.

I looked at my reflection in the small mirror above the washstand.

“You are in a room,” I told myself. “Second floor. Mrs. Hodge’s house. Birmingham. March, 1921.”

My reflection stared back, unconvinced.

“You are twenty-three years old.”

My voice broke on that one.

I tried again.

“You are twenty-three years old. You are a nurse. You worked today. You will work tomorrow.”

A sound came from outside. Quieter now. Wheels over stone, maybe. Or thunder too far away to matter.

I went back to the desk because lying down felt impossible. Studying was better. Studying gave the mind something to hold that did not bleed.

I opened one of my surgical texts and began reading by candlelight. Infection. Drainage. Fever patterns. The words lined up neatly, obedient little soldiers. I copied a note about abdominal rigidity, then another about antiseptic irrigation. My pen moved slower as the hour deepened. Somewhere in the house, a woman coughed again. I listened for the wetness of it, judged it without meaning to, then wrote more.

Around midnight, another distant crack sounded.

This one might have been a motor backfiring.

My body did not care.

The pen tore through the paper.

I sat frozen, ink blooming at the ruined point of the sentence.

No shouting followed. No boots. No cries for stretcher-bearers.

I waited anyway.

Minutes passed, or perhaps seconds disguised themselves as minutes. I could feel every beat of my pulse in my throat.

At last, I reached for another cigarette.

The room had grown cold with the window open, but I did not close it. Smoke needed somewhere to go. So did I.

I smoked and watched the city through the dark glass until my eyes stung. Birmingham looked almost peaceful from above if one ignored the sounds. Roofs gathered close together. Chimneys stood black against a blacker sky. A few lamps burned in upstairs rooms where other people fought their own private wars.

I wondered how many widows lived on this street.

I wondered how many men had come home from France and found they had brought the battlefield with them tucked under their minds.

I wondered whether the Shelby’s slept well in the city that spoke their name so carefully.

The thought came from nowhere and irritated me at once.

I did not need to wonder about dangerous men. I had work in the morning. I had Matron Hawthorne’s eyes, Edith’s dry approval, Mary’s warnings, patients with fevers, a boarding house with rules. I had enough to fill my mind without making room for a gangsters I had no business being around.

I finished the cigarette and returned to the journal.

Couldn’t sleep, I wrote.

Then stopped.

The sentence sat alone on the page, too honest and too small.

I added beneath it:

First night in Birmingham. Gunshots in the distance. Men fighting somewhere near Watery Lane. I thought of France more than once. I thought of Charles too. I smoked too much and studied because the body must eventually tire if the mind refuses mercy.

A pause.

Then:

I am afraid I will never sleep properly again.

The words looked shameful once written.

I almost crossed them out.

Instead, I left them.

There had been too much crossing out in my life already. Too many things softened for other people’s comfort. Father left became Father travelled for work when neighbours asked. Charles was blown apart somewhere in France became Charles did not make it home. I was terrified became I am fine.

Ink could keep the truth if my mouth would not.

Near two in the morning, the street quieted. Real quiet this time. The dangerous sort, though I was too tired by then to care what danger wanted from me.

I undressed from my dressing gown and returned to bed with cold feet and a head full of smoke. Charles’s photograph remained on the desk. I did not turn it away. I needed him there, even if looking at him hurt.

The mattress creaked as I lay down.

I kept my eyes on the ceiling until shapes began to blur. A cart rolled somewhere distant. A dog barked once. The woman beyond the wall coughed into cloth.

My last thought before sleep finally came was of the station.

Steam with noise. And a stranger’s voice asking whether I was lost.

I had said no.

I wondered, as Birmingham dragged me under, whether that had been my first lie in this city.

Or only the first one anyone had heard.

CW: Little Angst, miss-communication, reality of loving a celebrity, mention of grief and loss, vulnerable Pedro. Not much on this one, but we're heading to the end.

11.5K words

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27 - Neruda

PEDRO'S POV

The weather had shifted again. Spring trying to claw its way through the cold, running later than any place I've ever been.

I woke up to that grey-blue Calgary sky that never seemed to fully decide what it wanted. Rain, snow, sunlight — everything just hung there together.

A few more days and we were heading to Grand Prairie for the last stretch of shooting, that damn hospital scene that I know for a fact will take everything left from me. One more week after that and we’d be wrapping the whole year of shooting.

It honestly felt both, a long time coming, and too early at the same time. I should’ve felt lighter about finishing it. Instead, it felt like standing too close to the edge of a cliff.

She was already awake when I got back from the call sheet meeting. Her camera bag sat open on the couch, gear spread around her in neat little systems only she understood. Batteries lined in rows. Lenses cleaned spotless. Memory cards stacked beside her coffee cup.

She looked up when I walked in, but only for a second.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

My keys hit the bowl by the door with a sharp little clink. She went back to packing almost immediately.

“You ready for Grand Prairie?”

“Almost.” She spoke as someone who's too focused to talk. “Think I’m missing only a charger.”

“You want me to steal one from base camp?”

“I’ve got it.”

Too fast.

I stood there a second longer than I meant to. Watching her move around the apartment without really settling anywhere. Her shoulders were tight, with a mouth pressed thin. I knew that look on her. She got like that when something was chewing at her and she didn’t know how to spit it out yet.

Lately, it’d been happening more.

“I was thinking maybe after wrap party we could disappear for a few days,” I said carefully. “Before everything gets insane again.”

She paused with her back to me.

“I don’t think I can afford that.”

Something in my chest tightened a little. “Why not?”

She shrugged. “Meetings. Calls. Stuff coming in.”

“That Berlin project?”

“And Finland.” She finally looked over at me. “And some U.S. stuff now, apparently.”

“That’s good, though, right?”

“I don't know.”

There was no excitement in her tone, not a single drop of that feeling of doing something right. If anything, she sounded tired.

I walked farther into the kitchen, grabbing a glass from the cabinet mostly so I had something to do with my hands.

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“That’s not it.” She rubbed at her forehead briefly. “It’s just… everything’s moving really fast all of a sudden.”

I leaned against the counter. “You mean work?”

Another shrug.

“Work, travel...” She looked down at the strap in her hands. “Us.”

There it was.

That quiet dread of a feeling I've seen on her in passing. But lately, there was more to it, always afraid of something breaking.

I looked away first, jaw tightening before I could stop it. Filled my glass from the sink.

Behind me, I heard her sigh softly.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s fine.”

It wasn’t.

I took a drink and a deep breath. A few seconds passed before she spoke again.

“Sue talked to me yesterday.”

My hand stopped halfway to the counter.

“She... What?”

“At lunch.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “It wasn’t a big thing.”

I turned toward her slowly. “What did she say?”

“She just…” Her shoulders lifted helplessly. “She said some stuff about being realistic.”

My stomach dropped immediately.

“Realistic how?”

“She said people get caught up when they work together. That proximity makes things feel more intense than they actually are and—”

She stopped herself. Didn’t need to finish.

I set the glass down harder than I meant to.

“She actually said that to you?”

“She wasn’t rude, Pedro.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I think it was the sharp edge my words came out with, the room went quiet after that. Tense in that awful way where you can feel something bigger sitting underneath the conversation, waiting for somebody to touch that ugly monster hiding under the bed, just waiting for the wrong moment.

She looked down at her sleeve, thumb worrying at the cuff.

“I didn’t really listen at first,” she said quietly.

“But now you are.”

Her face shifted a little at that. Guilt maybe, or just frustration. Could Probably be both too.

I could see it happening in real time — whatever she’d been carrying around the last few days finally climbing up her throat.

And suddenly I didn’t want to hear it anymore.

I already knew it was going to hurt both of us if she let it out.

She opened her mouth like she was about to say something.

Then stopped.

A small shrug. Showing me that she was exhausted with herself for even bringing it up.

“Forget it,” she muttered.

I stared at her for another second, waiting. But she turned back to her camera bag instead. Safer to be busy.

And I let it die there.

Mostly because I was too tired to figure out how to save the conversation once it started breaking apart.

***

Two days in Grand Prairie and I was ready to call out of it. Even with the show being 95% done by now, the hardest and the most emotional part on my end was this hospital scene. It all leads to this.

Two days of stunts giving me headaches, freezing and dark corridors of this abandoned hospital, sixteen-hour shoots and catering coffee that tasted burnt no matter how much sugar you drowned it in.

Two days of sleeping in the same bed with her without really sleeping together.

By the time we got back to the room that night, my whole body hurt. Hers too, probably. She dropped her camera bag beside the little desk with a tired clatter and immediately started pulling memory cards from her jacket pockets.

Work mode.

Always work mode lately.

I shut the door behind me and watched her move around the room for a second.

No kiss hello.

No hand on my back.

Nothing.

Just that pure exhaustion hanging between us like wet clothes.

“You ate today?” I asked finally.

“Mhm.”

That probably meant no.

She crouched beside her bag, digging for a charger, shoulders tight beneath the hoodie she’d stolen from me weeks ago and never given back.

I stepped closer automatically, reaching for her jacket where it had twisted beneath the strap.

She flinched enough for it to sting inside of me. A knife straight into my ribs with such a small movement.

My hand dropped , and suddenly I was too tired of pretending I didn’t feel it anymore.

“Okay,” I said tiredly. “What’s going on?”

She froze for half a second before going back to the bag again.

“Nothing.”

“C’mon now.”

Another silence, then a sigh.

Exhausted don't even begin to cover or state right now. But we had to go over this. We had to.

“You already know what’s going on.”

I leaned back against the dresser, rubbing a hand over my face. “I know Sue talked to you. I don’t know what she said.”

The way I pointed it out made her finally look at me.

Her eyes looked wrecked. Red around the edges. She’d probably slept four hours total in the last two days.

“Already told you, she just…” She swallowed buying time to find the words. “She said we should be realistic, that's it.”

I let out a humorless laugh under my breath.

“Jesus Christ.”

“She wasn’t trying to be cruel.”

“That’s generous.”

“She wasn’t.” Her voice sharpened slightly, defensively. “She was talking about the industry. About schedules and distance and—”

“And what? Me suddenly forgetting I love you because filming ends in a couple of weeks?”

The second it came out, I regretted how harsh I sounded.

Her expression shifted immediately. Hurt written all over her face.

“That’s not what I fucking said.” She spat, also harsh, protective.

I looked away first.

The room felt too small all of a sudden. Hampton Inn hotel room, boots by the door, damp jackets hanging from the heater, our stuff in different places all at once.

I could feel us getting lost in this conversation already.

“Sue only said people get attached when they work together,” She explained again, with more bite to her worlds than she had the last time we had this same argument. “That proximity makes things feel bigger than they are.”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t fucking know, Pedro.”

Those words echoed inside the room, followed by a silence none of us wanted.

We were tired enough to be honest. Too honest.

She sat down slowly on the edge of the other bed, elbows on her knees.

“I’ve worked too damn hard for my career to disappear into somebody else’s life.”

“You think that’s what I want from you?”

“No.” She shook her head immediately. “No, that’s not—”

“Because it kinda sounds like that.”

“That’s not fair.”

I laughed once, no humor behind it, of course.

“Yeah? Neither is having my agent telling my girlfriend I’m eventually gonna leave her because my schedule gets busy.”

Her jaw tightened.

“She’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

I watched her fold into herself a little. Arms crossing tight over her chest like she was trying to physically hold everything in place. And suddenly she looked less angry, and more scared.

“I just…” Her voice cracked softly. “I don’t wanna build my life around someone and wake up one day realizing I was the easy thing to let go of.”

Silence.

Real, painful silence this time. Because I knew that fear didn’t start with my agent at that lunch meeting they had, no, Sue just gave it words.

I sat down slowly across from her, elbows on my knees mirroring hers.

“You really think I’d do that to you?”

She stared at the carpet, not able to meet my eyes.

“I think people mean things when they say them,” she whispered. “And then life gets complicated.”

Those words cuts through me when I'm not expecting. Maybe because part of me knew she wasn’t really talking about me anymore. She was talking about every person who’d ever made love feel temporary.

I looked at her for a long second before speaking again.

“You let somebody who barely knows my personal life tell you who I am.”

Her face tightened immediately.

“I know.”

“But you didn’t come to me.” My voice dropped quieter now. Trying to reach her in that dark place her mind made up. “You just started disappearing on me.”

That finally made her eyes lift to mine, and there she was again underneath all of it.

Scared. Exhausted. Loving me anyway.

“I didn’t know how to say it without sounding insane.”

“You could’ve sounded insane.”

A weak breath of a laugh escaped her then. Barely there, but enough for me to relax a little more.

My hands almost reached for her.

Almost.

But someone knocked twice before immediately pushing the door open.

Kate stepped inside holding a laptop against her chest, already talking before she fully looked up.

“I need you downstairs for the edit—”

She stopped.

Her eyes flicked between us once. Reading a lot ins just our body language.

“Oh,” Kate said carefully.

Neither of us answered.

Kate shifted the laptop awkwardly against her hip. “Sorry. I didn’t know you guys were…”

Fighting?

Nobody said it out loud.

Eyes still on Kate I felt the shift of my girl pushing herself up from the bed first, scrubbing both hands over her face.

“I’m coming,” she muttered.

Kate looked at her for another second too long. Concern written all over her face now.

“I can wait..."

“No need, I'm coming.”

Kate nodded, some embarrassment clinging to her expression as she watched her best friend gather her stuff around our room.

“We still have to go through yesterday’s hospital stuff before production sends selects. Don't wait for me."

Right.

More work.

More hours.

More avoiding each other while standing five feet apart all day.

I watched her pull her hoodie sleeves over her hands without looking at me once. Somehow that hurt worse than the argument itself.

When she reached the door, she finally paused. Kate already gone from there, no audience, but she still didn't turn to me to say it. Just stood there with her hand on the knob.

“I wasn't lying, I do love you, you know...” she said quietly.

Then she left before I could answer.

***

I’ve never hated silence this much before.

Don't get me wrong, we still talk, mostly about call times, weather delays, or which road production wants blocked off next. She still hands me coffee when catering runs out before I get there. I still reach for her instinctively when we’re crossing those dark hospital corridors in between setups.

But everything feels half a second off now.

Like we’re both thinking too hard before touching each other.

She's been looking at me like loving me scared her more than losing me.

She keeps working like nothing’s wrong, when everything is.

That’s the worst part.

Camera always hanging around her neck, hair shoved up messily. Fingers moving nonstop — changing lenses, adjusting settings, wiping dust off equipment with the sleeve of her jacket because she’s too tired to look for a cloth.

Nobody else would notice anything.

But I do.

I notice she doesn’t lean against me while playback resets anymore.

I notice she walks back to the trailers with crew instead of waiting for me.

I notice every tiny thing she stops doing, and I still try to act normal. Still joke around between takes. Still run my stunts around, even though I shouldn't be doing them, but I'm too stubborn. Still sit with everyone at lunch pretending my stomach doesn’t feel permanently twisted.

Some part of me is waiting all day.

Waiting for her to look at me the way she did before Sue talked to her.

A look of recognition that I was her home, her safe place.

Around noon, Kate drops down beside me on an apple box near catering, unwrapping a protein bar with her teeth.

She watches me for a second too long before speaking.

“You look like shit.”

I let out a tired laugh through my nose. “Good afternoon to you too.”

“I’m serious.” She nudges my knee lightly with her boot. “What’s going on with you two?”

I glance automatically across set.

She’s near the monitors with one of the lighting guys, reviewing stills on the back of her camera. Focused enough, professional as hell, and somehow the most beautiful human being to exist.

But she was too far away.

“Nothing,” I say.

Kate snorts immediately.

“Pedro.”

That tone right there — best friend tone. The one that says don’t insult my intelligence.

I look down at the sandwich in my hands. Suddenly not hungry anymore.

“We’re just tired.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We are.” My voice comes out too quickly "this last stretch is wearing us out."

Kate studies me for another second.

Then softer:

“You guys haven’t looked at each other properly in like… four days?”

Yup, that tracks. Kate's right.

We’ve looked around each other. Through each other. Past each other. But not really at each other lately.

I scrub a hand over my mouth, exhausted down to the bone.

“It’s complicated.”

Kate sighs quietly beside me, folding the wrapper in half between her fingers.

“Did she tell you what Sue said?”

Part of me wants to pretend I don’t know what she means.

I’m too tired for that too.

“Some of it.”

Kate mutters something under her breath that definitely sounds like a curse. Then she glances back toward her best friend again, expression tightening slightly.

“She’s scared,” she says finally.

“I know.”

“No, I mean really scared.” Kate looks back at me. “You know how she gets when something matters too much.”

Yeah. I do know how she gets, and maybe that was the problem.

Because suddenly I understood that none of this distance was coming from her loving me less. It was coming from her loving me enough for it to terrify her.

Kate bumps my shoulder lightly.

“Just don’t let her sit in her own head too long,” she says. “That place is dangerous.”

Then production calls my name from somewhere behind us and she pushes herself back up with a groan. Conversation interrupted is something Kate hates more than anything.

“Also, seriously,” she adds, pointing at me as she walks backwards away from me, “you look deeply terrifying right now. This whole Joel look mixed with Pedro who's in a middle of a fight will do numbers on television.”

I laugh despite myself. A real one this time.

Only Kate can get something like that from me at the moment.

Across set, her eyes flick toward me automatically at the sound.

Just for a second.

***

Bella notices next.

Of course they do.

They’re sitting outside the waiting area between setups with their that awful hospital gown and one earbud hanging loose, pretending to scroll through their phone while quietly tracking every person around them like a tiny exhausted detective.

I just finished one stunt scene, there's still fake blood hanging on my clothes and my skin, but I don't care, just head over there mostly because my legs need a minute to stop hurting. The second I sit beside them with a groan, Bella glances sideways at me and immediately squints.

“You look deeply unwell.”

I laugh tiredly, rubbing both hands over my face before reaching for my water bottle. “That’s a horrible thing to say to someone.”

“I’m serious.” Their eyes narrow slightly. “You look like a divorced dad who forgot how to use happiness.”

Damn, that gets an actual laugh out of me, small and rough from exhaustion.

“Jesus Christ.”

Bella shrugs, entirely pleased with themself.

Around us, production is resetting lights for the next setup. Crew members stomp through cabes of lights carrying some other cables while somebody farther down the corridor swears loudly after dropping a case of equipment. Everything feels cramped lately — set ups, stunts, extras, crew all in one single small space.

I take a long drink of water and immediately realize Bella is still staring at me.

Studying.

“What?” I ask finally.

They hesitate for maybe half a second.

“Did you guys break up?”

I choke so hard on the water it burns the back of my throat.

Bella barely reacts.

“That bad, huh?” They mutter.

“We did not break up.”

“Okay.” They pull one knee up against their chest. “Then what’s happening?”

I look automatically across set before answering.

She’s standing near video village with her camera hanging against her chest, talking quietly to Craig and Neil while flipping through stills on the tiny screen. From far away she looks normal enough. Focused. Working. But even from here I can see how tired she is. The way she keeps shifting her weight from one leg to the other. The way her free hand keeps rubbing absentmindedly at the back of her neck between shots.

I know every version of her by now.

Including the ones nobody else notices.

“It's nothing,” I say finally.

Bella hums softly beside me, unconvinced.

“You handed her the battery that fell on the ground three hours ago like it was a hostage exchange.”

I look over at them slowly.

Bella lifts both hands innocently.

“I’m just saying. The vibes are bleak.”

Despite myself, my mouth twitches a little.

But the truth is they’re right.

Today somehow feels worse than the actual fight did.

At least the fight had emotion in it. Anger. Fear. The rawness of it all. But now it’s just this slow careful distance that keeps growing every time we don’t say what we actually need.

We still move around each other automatically all day long, but it feels different now. Hesitant. As if both of us are suddenly aware of every touch before it happens.

She stops at craft services only when I’m leaving.

I catch myself waiting before walking into rooms if I hear her voice inside them.

Nobody else notices it because nobody else knows us well enough to see the difference. To everyone on set we probably just look overworked, which honestly isn’t wrong. She’s barely slipping between production and meetings for projects after wrap, and I’ve spent so much time emotionally tangled up in my own head the last few days that I don’t even remember the last thing I ate.

Still, every now and then I catch her looking at me when she thinks I’m not paying attention.

And every single time it wrecks me a little.

Bella follows my gaze back toward her again.

“She looks sad,” They say quietly.

And that's the ugly truth. No matter what, the past few days, every time I look at her I see that same messy feeling. Even when she laughs now, it disappears too quickly afterward.

“Yeah,” I admit softly.

Bella leans back against the chair beside me, silent for a moment.

“You know in apocalypse stories the first thing that falls apart is always communication.”

I glance over at them.

Bella shrugs one shoulder.

“I’m just saying. Historically speaking, you two are making terrible survival choices right now.”

It's not funny, I know that. But we both laugh at the comparison. Genuine laugh.

Bella looks deeply satisfied by that small miracle.

“Okay, good,” they mutter. “You were starting to concern me on a spiritual level.”

Later that night after wrap, I found her sitting there wrapped in one of the blankets from the room with her MacBook open beside her on the metal railing near the ice machine, staring out into the parking lot like her brain had wandered somewhere too far away to come back quickly.

The hotel sign buzzed overhead, throwing that washed-out red-blue light over everything. It caught in the damp ends of her hair and painted tired shadows beneath her eyes. She still had one of my hoodies on underneath the blanket, sleeves pulled halfway over her hands.

For a second I just stood there watching her without saying anything.

I missed her even now, sitting right there.

The last few days had been full of almosts. Almost touching her. Almost saying something right. Almost reaching for her in all the little automatic ways my body still wanted to.

And every time I hesitated, the distance between us seemed to grow another inch.

She noticed me eventually.

Her head turned slightly in my direction, eyes tired but softer than they’d been earlier. No smile showed up, but she shifted a little on the railing, moving the laptop enough to make room beside her.

It was such a small thing, but still felt like relief.

I walked over quietly and sat beside her, the metal freezing even through my jeans.

“You’re gonna get hypothermia out here.”

That finally pulled the faintest hint of a smile from her mouth.

“Probably.”

The cold air turned our breath white between us for a second before disappearing.

I looked over at her properly then. Up close, she looked exhausted. Not just physically, but the exhaustion that settles into somebody after too many nights thinking instead of sleeping.

There were dark circles under her eyes she’d stopped bothering to cover by day three of this shoot. Her fingers kept tapping lightly against the edge of the laptop in restless little patterns, like her body didn’t know how to power down anymore.

“Why aren’t you inside?” I asked more quietly.

She stared out toward the empty road beyond the parking lot before answering.

“My brain won’t shut off.”

Yeah.

I knew that feeling too well.

Anxiety.

For a minute neither of us said anything. Somewhere down the road a truck engine groaned loudly before fading off into the distance again.

I wanted to touch her so badly my chest hurt with it.

Not even in some huge dramatic or sexual way.

I just wanted to take her hand.

Pull her sideways into me. Rub warmth back into her fingers. Kiss the tired space between her eyebrows that only showed up when she was overwhelmed.

I wanted us back fully.

Instead I looked down at the laptop screen beside her.

“What’re you working on?”

“Berlin schedule and budget before the next meeting.”

The answer came carefully.

As if she was testing whether saying those words out loud would hurt me. And suddenly that hurt worse than the project and the distance themselves ever could.

Because somewhere along the line, she’d started treating her future like something she needed to soften around me.

I leaned back slightly against the railing, trying not to let any of that show on my face.

“That’s good,” I said quietly.

She nodded once but didn’t look convinced.

We were two exhausted people sitting shoulder to shoulder while too many unspoken things crowded the air around them, so there was some silence.

Her blanket shifted slightly in the wind and without thinking, I reached over to pull it more securely around her shoulders.

The movement made both of us pause for half a second.

The automatic feeling I have to protect her was still here. And it felt good to let her see that.

Her eyes lifted to mine then, softer now. Tired enough to stop pretending she didn’t miss me too.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

I nodded once.

My hand stayed there for a second too long before dropping back into my lap.

After another minute, she finally closed the laptop with a tired sigh and leaned back beside me. Her shoulder brushing mine lightly.

Neither of us moved away from it this time.

And somehow that tiny bit of contact felt bigger than every conversation we’d failed to have all week.

READER'S POV

I still don’t know why I said yes to lunch.

Maybe because part of me was curious.

Maybe because another part of me was tired of feeling like I was constantly being evaluated by people who already thought they knew exactly who I was.

Sue had never been openly rude to me. Neither had Franklin. That was the thing about them — they were too polished for cruelty to ever look obvious.

But there’d been moments over the last few months that stayed under my skin longer than they should’ve.

Rejected stills over microscopic details nobody else cared about. Last-minute requests for reshoots after HBO had already approved selects. Tiny notes buried in emails that somehow always managed to make me feel young, inexperienced, temporary.

Never enough to call it personal.

Always enough to feel it.

So when Sue stopped beside me outside basecamp that afternoon and asked if I wanted to grab lunch before afternoon call, I think part of me thought maybe this was her extending an olive branch.

Or maybe I just wanted her to finally see me as more than the girl sleeping with her client.

“There’s a little Italian place nearby,” she’d said while slipping sunglasses onto her head. “Quiet. And they make decent coffee, which is apparently impossible in this city.”

I remember laughing at that.

And then, somehow, saying yes.

The restaurant was tucked between a pharmacy and a bookstore a few blocks off set. Warm inside. Low lighting. Dark wood tables scratched with years of use. The kind of place that tried to feel casual while still charging twenty dollars for pasta.

Sue looked perfectly at home there.

Everything about her always seemed carefully assembled without appearing overly done. Cream blouse. Gold jewelry. That expensive kind of minimal makeup that somehow made people look genetically superior instead of professionally styled.

Meanwhile I still smelled faintly like fake blood and set mud.

I caught myself trying to wipe dirt from beneath my nails before she noticed.

That annoyed me immediately.

The waitress recognized Sue within seconds, though not in a celebrity way. More like the kind of recognition people reserve for women who seem important.

Sue smiled politely, ordered sparkling water with lemon, then turned her attention fully onto me in a way that immediately felt disarming.

She asked about the stills from episode eight first. Told me she’d seen some of the winter shots from that one and liked the way I framed isolation inside wide landscapes.

Actual technical observations.

I remember blinking at her for a second because most people outside photography talked about my work like they were describing wallpaper.

“Your composition’s gotten stronger since the beginning of the show,” she said while unfolding her napkin across her lap. “You’re letting moments breathe more now.”

And stupidly, embarrassingly, I felt proud hearing that from her.

Because she’s someone who has been in this field longer than I have, and she knows what success looks like. Sue was one of those women who walked into rooms already knowing exactly how much power she had inside them.

“You’ve been looking at my work that closely?” I asked, trying to sound lighter than I felt.

Sue smiled slightly over the rim of her glass.

“Well, yes. It’s part of my job to know what’s surrounding Pedro.”

There it was.

Subtle enough to almost miss.

I smiled anyway.

We ordered food after that. I got wine mostly because suddenly I felt nervous in a way I couldn’t explain. Sue didn’t drink.

“If I start before three, somebody from HBO’s getting verbally assaulted by dinner,” she said dryly.

That got a real laugh out of me.

And honestly, for a while, lunch felt… nice.

That was the dangerous part.

She asked about what was next for me. What the future holds for the award winner. I told her the future still looks a little uncertain, that I’m still choosing.

Most people in this industry still treated my career like an accessory to whatever production I happened to be standing beside. Sue talked about it like it had weight. Like it existed independently from anybody else.

Like I existed independently from anybody else.

“You’re at an interesting point right now,” she said eventually, twirling pasta slowly against her fork. “Your name’s starting to circulate in rooms that matter.”

I tried to shrug it off casually even though my stomach tightened immediately.

“Maybe.”

“No, definitely.” Her eyes lifted to mine evenly. “You’ve got instincts people can’t teach.”

That one got to me, or better: That got to my head. My artist mind filling itself with that dangerous ego.

Because I’d spent so many years clawing my way into rooms where nobody took still photographers seriously to begin with, let alone young women without decades of credits behind them.

And suddenly here was someone powerful treating me like an artist instead of an attachment.

I think that was the moment my guard really dropped.

By the time she finally brought Pedro into the conversation, I’d already forgotten to protect myself properly.

“So,” she said lightly, setting her glass down empty. “How are you two handling all this?”

The question caught me off guard enough that I paused halfway through reaching for my drink.

“All this?”

“The secrecy, and schedules.” A small shrug. “The fact that his life’s about to become completely unmanageable.”

It didn’t feel like an attack, not with that smooth and gentle tone. Almost like she really cared about how we’d survive what’s next.

I stared down into my wine for a second before answering.

“We’re figuring it out.”

Sue nodded slowly like she understood more than I was saying.

“I imagine that gets complicated.”

I thought immediately of December.

A blurry picture leaking into the press and suddenly I was transformed into the secret girlfriend. Everything around me that time was focus on the mystery.

I didn’t even asked him how much they spent trying to manage the damage done by one brief kiss at the airport.

“We’ve been careful,” I said quietly.

“You have,” Sue agreed.

Something about the way she said it made my chest tighten.

“He’s getting pulled in a lot of directions right now,” she continued carefully. “I’m pretty sure he already told you about Marvel wanting him. Studios and directors want him. Every network suddenly wants meetings.” Her eyes stayed on mine. “And your career’s taking off at exactly the same time.”

My fucking mind started the works right then. The possibilities, and all the paths ahead of me and my career. Everything felt real now. A good four to five months of my year swallowed by productions that wanted me.

For the first time in my life, people were asking for me specifically.

“I’m not asking him to choose between things,” I said finally, deflecting and defensive all at once.

“I know you’re not.”

Again, so soft you could almost miss it.

That was what made her dangerous.

Sue leaned back slightly in her chair then, studying me with an expression I still can’t fully explain even now.

“You know what I think?” she asked quietly.

I should’ve shut the conversation down there.

Instead I sat there waiting for her answer, curious enough to get hurt.

“I think you’ve worked very hard to become somebody on your own.” Her voice stayed calm and warm and impossibly measured. “And I’d hate to see you disappear into someone else’s orbit right when the industry’s finally starting to see you clearly.”

A red alert was lit up right there inside my mind. None of those words were new to me, but when someone spoke them so clearly, it finally set something off inside of me.

Because I was already afraid they might become true someday.

And Sue saw it happen on my face too.

That was the worst part.

She fucking got what she came here for.

When lunch came to the end, she offered to pay the whole bill, and we were talking about lenses and festival circuits again as if nothing had happened.

I cursed my stubborness. So dumb for nothing, letting some stranger get inside my mind like that.

I felt the shift when I spotted Pedro laughing beside one of the trucks, sunglasses on, curls pushed back by the wind.

Usually seeing him made my whole body soften automatically.

That day, something else slipped in too.

Fear of how much I suddenly had to lose.

***

I spent most of the morning of my day off wandering around Grand Prairie with my camera hanging uselessly against my chest.

Pretending to be out to exercise my creativity. Pretending I was doing something photography related.

Really, I was just trying to figure out how the hell to fix what I broke.

The town was quiet in a way Calgary never was. Empty sidewalks. Wet pavement from the rain early that day. Little stores with handwritten signs in the windows and pickup trucks parked crooked outside cafés.

Everything felt slow here.

Meanwhile my brain hadn’t shut up in three days.

Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing him.

A jacket he would've made fun of. A bakery window he would've stopped at immediately because he had the appetite of a tired teenage boy whenever we worked long shoots. A dog tied outside the grocery store that would've had him crouched on the sidewalk making baby voices within seconds.

And underneath all of it was this awful realization slowly clawing its way up my throat:

I missed him even when he was standing five feet away from me.

I missed him all the time now.

By the time I wandered onto Main Street, my hands were freezing around the camera I’d barely used all morning.

I’d spent the last hour pretending I was out looking for compositions, but every time I lifted the camera to my eye, my brain drifted somewhere else entirely. Toward him, in that hotel room… Toward the horrible expression on his face the night we fought.

It hit me all at once then, standing outside some tiny pharmacy while cold wind pushed at my jacket:

I didn’t know how to exist in my life anymore without automatically making space for him inside it.

Like my days had quietly rearranged themselves around loving him when I wasn’t paying attention.

By the time I reached the bookstore near the corner, I knew I was looking for something that would’ve say: I’m sorry for hurting you.

The little cart outside was overflowing with secondhand paperbacks swollen from weather and age, pages yellowed and curling at the corners. The whole thing smelled faintly like damp paper and dust warmed by old heaters.

I almost walked past it.

Then I saw the Neruda book tucked sideways beneath a stack of cracked mystery novels.

The cover was soft with wear, faded blue around the edges, Spanish printed beside English in uneven lettering.

And immediately I thought about Pedro half-asleep beside me after long shoot days, slipping into Spanish without realizing it whenever he got tired enough.

The way his voice changed when he spoke it.

Softer somehow.

More unguarded.

I picked the book up carefully, running my thumb along the bent spine.

It felt like him.

Not polished Pedro. Not actor Pedro.

The real one.

The one who read over my shoulder in bed. The one who kissed my forehead absentmindedly while answering emails. The one who looked at me like I was something fragile whenever I got overwhelmed and tried pretending I wasn’t.

Before I could overthink myself out of it, I carried the book inside.

The woman working the register barely glanced up while ringing me through. Some old folk song crackled quietly through a radio behind her while she dropped the book into a paper bag.

“You from the production?” she asked casually.

“Yeah.”

She nodded like that explained everything.

Outside again, the cold hit my face immediately, but I barely noticed it this time.

Because suddenly I was terrified.

Not of him.

That was the thing.

Pedro almost never raised his voice. Even angry, he tried to understand people before he reacted to them. Sometimes to a fault.

No, what scared me was walking back into that room and seeing distance in his face again.

Seeing resignation.

Like he’d started preparing himself for me leaving already.

I reached our room, my stomach in knots so tight I thought I might actually throw up.

One minute long of thinking about opening that door. I stood there longer than I should have, fingers curled around the paper bag hard enough to wrinkle it.

Inside, I could hear the ac unit rattling faintly through the wall.

For one ridiculous second, I almost turned around.

Then I thought about sleeping another night beside him without really touching him and suddenly that felt unbearable.

So I finally pushed the door open quietly and stepped inside.

The curtains were mostly shut, thin afternoon light spilling through the gaps in pale stripes across the carpet and bedspread. Pedro was lying on top of the blankets fully dressed, one arm thrown over his eyes, boots still on like he’d laid down for a second and never found the energy to move back up again.

And God, the second I saw him, every wall I’d spent days building around myself started collapsing at once.

I closed the hotel door quietly behind me, careful with the handle out of habit more than necessity.

Pedro shifted slightly on the bed at the sound, one arm still thrown over his eyes, boots hanging halfway off the mattress like he’d laid down intending to rest for five minutes and never found the energy to move again. The room smelled faintly like damp jackets and the stale motel heater humming near the window.

For a second I just stood there looking at him.

The last few days had done something to both of us. I could see it now that I wasn’t busy defending myself against every feeling I had. There was tension sitting heavily in his shoulders, exhaustion carved beneath his eyes. Even asleep — or close to it — he looked like somebody bracing for impact.

And the worst part was knowing I’d put some of that there.

“Hey,” I said softly.

His arm moved enough for him to look at me. “Hey.”

Jesus, his voice.

Still warm and gentle, even after everything.

I crossed the room slowly and sat down near his legs, the mattress dipping beneath me. Pedro shifted automatically to make space without even thinking about it. Some habits between us had become muscle memory by now.

For a few seconds neither of us really spoke. I could hear the television from another room bleeding faintly through the wall and the sound of tires moving slowly over wet pavement outside.

“I walked around town for a while,” I said finally.

Pedro rubbed a hand over his face before looking at me properly. “Find anything exciting?”

I huffed out the smallest laugh. “Depends. Do you consider hypothermia exciting?”

That earned me the faintest smile. Tired, but real enough to soften something inside my chest immediately.

“There’s apparently an alarming number of antique stores in this city,” I added. “Which feels unnecessary for a town this size.”

“Maybe old people just really thrive here.”

“Possible.”

The smile lingered another second before fading again, though not completely this time. He pushed himself up a little against the pillows, attention settling fully onto me now in a way that made my stomach tighten.

I held the paper bag out toward him carefully.

His eyes dropped to it first, then back to me with quiet confusion before he finally reached for it. Our fingers brushed when he took the book from my hands and neither of us pulled away quickly enough to pretend we hadn’t both noticed it.

Pedro glanced down at the cover.

Movements stilled.

“Neruda,” he murmured, thumb dragging lightly across the worn spine.

I nodded. “I saw it outside this bookstore and immediately thought of you.”

His expression shifted at that. Small. Almost impossible to catch if I didn’t know him so well by now.

“Why?”

“You still see beauty even in the darkest places.”

Pedro looked back down at the book, quieter suddenly. More careful with it than something secondhand probably deserved.

“And also,” I added softly. “I remembered you mentioning your mom liked him.”

For a second he didn’t answer. He just opened the book slowly near the middle, eyes scanning the pages without really reading them.

Then he exhaled through his nose and leaned his head back against the wall behind the bed.

“I haven’t seen this one in years.”

Something about the way he said it made a strong sad feeling lodged inside my chest.

Not because it sounded nostalgic. This memory of his felt too personal.

I watched his fingers moving absently over the pages while I tried to gather the courage to say the thing I should’ve said days ago.

All the rehearsed versions disappeared the second I opened my mouth.

“I’m sorry.”

Pedro’s eyes lifted to mine immediately.

The room suddenly felt very small.

“I think…” I stopped, rubbing my hands together nervously before trying again. “I think I got so scared of needing you this much that I started pulling away before you ever had the chance to hurt me.”

The words sounded ugly out loud. Honest in the worst way.

Pedro stayed very still across from me, listening so carefully it almost made me emotional all over again.

“I didn’t even realize I was doing it at first,” I admitted quietly. “I just kept hearing all this stuff in my head about timing and distance and careers and eventually it turned into…” I shook my head helplessly. “Whatever the hell the last few days were.”

He swallowed once before answering.

“You made me feel like you were already leaving.”

There wasn’t accusation in his voice. Just hurt and the kind of helplessness that comes with not knowing what to do.

I looked down at my hands immediately because I couldn’t stand the expression on his face for another second.

“I know.”

The silence after that stretched long enough that I could hear the ac click loudly behind us.

Then I felt the bed shift a little.

Pedro moved closer slowly, elbows resting on his knees now, the book still hanging loose in one hand.

“You know what the worst part was?” he asked quietly.

I looked up again.

He gave this small exhausted shake of his head before continuing.

“I understood why you were scared.” His eyes stayed on mine. “That’s what killed me.”

Damn.

Something inside me cracked open completely at that.

Because of course he understood.

Pedro understood people too easily sometimes. Even when they were hurting him.

“I kept thinking maybe if I pushed too hard to fix it, you’d disappear even faster,” he admitted, voice rougher now. “So I didn’t know what to do except stand there and watch you get farther away from me every day.”

My eyes burned instantly.

Without thinking, I reached for him then. Both hands wrapping around his wrist first before sliding down to lace through his fingers.

Pedro let out the smallest breath the second I touched him.

Relief in it’s purest form.

His hand closed around mine immediately like his body had been waiting for permission.

“I missed you so much,” I whispered.

That finally pulled a real expression out of him. Pain, affection, exhaustion — all tangled together across his face at once.

“I was right here,” he said softly.

“I know.”

And that was exactly why it felt so awful.

Because he had been right there beside me the entire time while I let fear turn him into something distant in my head.

Pedro’s thumb moved slowly across the back of my hand while he watched me for another long second.

Then, carefully, like he still wasn’t fully convinced I wouldn’t pull away again, he reached up and touched my face.

His palm was warm against my cheek.

“You’re freezing, Cariño” he murmured automatically, brushing his thumb beneath my eye where tears had started gathering again without me noticing.

The tenderness in that simple sentence nearly undid me.

I leaned into his hand before I could stop myself, eyes closing for half a second at the familiar feeling of him touching me like something precious.

“I love you,” I whispered.

The words came out quietly. Like breathing.

Pedro shut his eyes briefly after I said it, forehead dropping forward for a second like he physically felt the impact of hearing it again after the last few days.

Then he looked at me and kissed me.

Slowly at first.

Carefully enough that I could feel the hesitation still lingering between us, the leftover fear, the uncertainty about whether we were fully okay yet.

But the second my hand slid into his curls and his mouth softened against mine, something between us finally gave way.

The tension was no longer a thing. That distance becoming less and less threatening.

Pedro made this quiet sound against my mouth that wrecked me instantly, one arm pulling me into him hard enough that I nearly lost balance climbing fully into his lap.

And suddenly we were kissing like people who had spent days pretending they didn’t need each other quite this badly.

His hands kept moving like he was reassuring himself I was really there — my waist, my back, my hair, my face — while I held onto him just as tightly, forehead knocking against his once when we both laughed breathlessly into the kiss.

When we finally pulled apart, neither of us moved very far.

Pedro rested his forehead against mine, breathing unevenly, one hand still cupping the back of my neck.

I was home, safe. Finally.

After that desperate kiss, he kept turning the book over in his hands, thumb moving slowly along the softened edges of the cover while I stayed tucked against him beneath the blankets. The motel room had gone dim around us at some point.

For a while we just stayed there tangled together quietly, my head resting against his shoulder while his fingers drifted absentmindedly through the damp ends of my hair.

Then he smiled faintly down at the book again.

“You know,” he said, voice still rough and sleepy from everything we’d just cried through, “she used to read Neruda to us all the time.”

I lifted my head slightly to look at him. “Yeah?”

“Mhm.” His eyes stayed on the pages as he opened the book carefully. “I haven’t held one of these in years.”

There was something in his expression I couldn’t fully place at first. Not sadness exactly. More like somebody brushing their hand over a scar they forgot was still there.

I shifted closer instinctively, one leg sliding over his beneath the blankets while my hand settled against the center of his chest. His heartbeat felt steady under my palm now. Calm again.

“I didn’t know that about you.”

Pedro let out a quiet laugh through his nose.

“There’s probably a lot you still don’t know about me.”

He said it lightly, but there was vulnerability underneath it that made me look at him more carefully.

He’d always shared pieces of himself slowly. Never because he was closed off or secretive — that wasn’t really him. Pedro loved loudly and very openly. But there were parts of him tied so tightly to childhood and grief and family that he handled them gently even in conversation.

“She loved poetry,” he said after a moment, fingertips pausing against one of the pages. “Especially Neruda. My mom used to read to us when things were rough at home.”

His arm tightened slightly around my waist while he spoke, pulling me in until my cheek rested fully against his chest. I could hear the low rumble of his voice through him before I even caught the words themselves.

“We’d all be sitting in the living room pretending we didn’t want to be there,” he continued with a softer smile. “Javiera would complain the loudest. Lux usually got emotional immediately.” He laughed quietly at the memory. “And Nicolás always acted deeply inconvenienced by feelings in general.”

I smiled against his shirt. “Sounds familiar somehow.”

“Oh, I was absolutely the worst of them,” Pedro admitted. “My poor mother had four dramatic children and a husband who encouraged all of us.”

“That explains a lot actually.”

He laughed again then, fuller this time, and I felt some of the heaviness between us finally loosen for real. The sound vibrated warm beneath my ear while his hand moved slowly up and down my back beneath the oversized hoodie I’d stolen from him weeks ago.

But after a minute the laughter faded naturally, leaving behind something quieter.

“There were periods after we moved where things got hard financially,” he said eventually, gaze drifting somewhere far past the hotel room walls now. “Hard enough that even as kids we could tell everybody was stressed all the time.”

His fingers kept tracing absentminded circles against my side while he spoke.

“My parents tried really hard to protect us from it. Especially my mom.” A small pause. “But kids notice everything. You hear conversations through walls. You hear your parents trying not to fight.”

Something tightened painfully in my chest hearing him talk like this. Maybe because I’d spent so long seeing the version of Pedro everybody else saw — charismatic, funny, impossible not to look at — that moments like these still caught me off guard sometimes.

The softness underneath him.

That shy little boy still living somewhere inside the man I love.

“She used to read when the house got heavy,” he said quietly. “Like she could pull everybody into another world for half an hour and let us breathe there instead.”

I stayed quiet, letting him move through the memory at his own pace.

Pedro looked down at the book again with this distant expression that made him suddenly look younger to me somehow.

“I think that’s probably where I got it from,” he admitted with a small shrug. “Acting. Storytelling. All of it. Watching somebody change the feeling in a room just by speaking.”

I don’t think he even realized how vulnerable he sounded in that moment.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe that was the point. He was letting me in.

I reached up slowly and brushed my fingers through the curls near the back of his neck, feeling him melt almost immediately beneath the touch.

“Will you read one to me?”

Pedro hesitated then, eyes flicking briefly back toward the pages.

Not because he didn’t want to.

Because this mattered to him.

I could feel that now.

Then he nodded once and adjusted himself against the headboard, pulling me fully into his lap without even thinking about it. One arm wrapped securely around my waist while the other held the book open between us, his thumb resting near the spine.

Held.

That was the overwhelming feeling of it.

Held so carefully that my entire body started relaxing before my brain caught up.

Pedro cleared his throat softly before he started reading, and the second the words left his mouth, his whole voice changed.

Lower and slower.

His actor voice gone, as this was not a performance. This was something incredible intimate and private. Only for me this time.

“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off…”

His accent thickened slightly around certain words, eyes drifting automatically toward the Spanish text whenever he lost rhythm in the English version. I could feel every line resonate through his chest beneath my cheek while his hand moved slowly against my side in unconscious patterns.

Outside, I could hear trucks somewhere on the highway and some people walking in that hotel, but all of it started fading behind the sound of him reading.

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

Emotion climbed slowly into my throat listening to him.

The poem itself was beautiful, sure. But I cried because this was him.

This was the most unguarded version of Pedro I’d ever been allowed to see.

No cameras around, no questions from interviews, no charming public version of himself carefully assembled for other people.

Just a tired man in a hotel room reading poetry the way his mother once read it to him when life felt frightening.

By the time he reached the final lines, my eyes were already wet.

“So close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

Neither of us spoke immediately afterward.

Pedro stayed still for a second with the book open in his lap while my fingers curled loosely into the fabric of his shirt.

When I finally looked up at him, his eyes were already on me.

Open in a way that almost hurt to look at directly.

“Was that her favorite?” I asked softly.

He nodded once.

“Yeah. She used to read that one whenever one of us was sad.” A tired smile touched his mouth. “Which was often. We were an aggressively emotional household.”

I laughed quietly through some tears threatening falling again.

“I genuinely cannot imagine where you got that from.”

That earned me another small laugh, but it faded quickly this time.

Pedro looked back down at the book for a moment before speaking again, his thumb resting against the edge of the page.

“She made people feel safe,” he said quietly. “That was her thing. You could walk into a room completely wrecked and somehow leave feeling like maybe your life wasn’t ending after all.”

His voice shifted slightly on the last sentence.

Almost imperceptibly.

Still enough for me to hear the grief underneath it.

“I still miss her all the time,” he admitted.

The honesty of it hit me harder than anything else had.

No performance in the words. No attempt to make grief sound poetic or profound.

Just truth.

I touched his face carefully then, thumb brushing beneath his eye while he leaned into my hand in a way that immediately undid me.

“I wish I could’ve met her,” I whispered.

Pedro looked at me for a long moment after that, something soft and unbearably emotional moving across his face.

Then he smiled a little through it and said quietly:

“She would’ve loved you.”

That was it.

That was the thing that broke me completely.

I buried my face against his neck immediately, laughing once through tears while Pedro wrapped both arms around me tightly enough that the book nearly slipped from his lap onto the bed beside us.

And somewhere in the middle of him holding me there — warm, exhausted, breathing softly against my hair — I realized relationships probably survived because of moments exactly like this.

Not the easy ones.

The moments where somebody trusted you enough to hand you the most fragile parts of themselves and believe you’d hold them gently.

After a while we gave up on pretending we were gonna leave the room again, it was already dark outside and the wind had picked up hard enough to make the hotel windows rattle every few minutes.

Pedro was sprawled across the bed beside me with his phone balanced on his stomach, scrolling through DoorDash with the concentration of somebody making life-altering decisions.

“This town has no good food,” he announced gravely.

“You’ve been saying that for two days.”

“Because it keeps being true.”

I laughed quietly into the pillow while he kept scrolling.

The truth was, I would’ve eaten cardboard at that point if it meant staying exactly where we were: Warm bodies tangled together again. Him absentmindedly rubbing circles into my hip through the blanket while some awful dating reality show played low in the background.

The relief of being back inside each other’s orbit felt almost physical. Like my whole body had unclenched without me realizing how tense I’d been.

Pedro suddenly sat up straighter beside me.

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Burger King is open.”

I stared at him.

“You cannot be serious.”

“Whopper meal. Onion rings. Chicken fries.” He looked over at me with genuine excitement. “Baby, we’re healing.”

“That’s the most divorced man order I’ve ever heard.”

“You’re being classist.”

I snorted so hard I almost dropped my phone.

Pedro immediately looked pleased with himself for managing to pull the sound out of me.

That was the thing about him. Even during the worst parts of the last few days, I’d still catch him trying. Little jokes under his breath. Touching the back of my arm when he walked past me on set. Looking over to make sure I was eating when the days got too long.

Pedro couldn’t help loving people out loud.

Even hurt, he still reached.

Twenty minutes later we were sitting cross-legged in bed surrounded by crumpled Burger King wrappers while the TV still played that aggressive terrible reality show neither of us fully understood.

Pedro had stolen most of my fries already.

“You have your own.”

“They taste better from your container.”

“That’s literally impossible.”

“It’s emotional science.”

I rolled my eyes and leaned back against the headboard while he reached over to steal another one anyway, grinning when I slapped his hand away too late.

Outside, rain tapped steadily against the windows.

Inside, though, everything finally felt warm again.

Comfortably messy.

My bare legs tangled automatically with his beneath the blankets while he balanced a carton of onion rings against my knee and got increasingly emotionally invested in the reality show contestants.

“I’m telling you right now,” he said around a bite of burger, pointing toward the television, “that man is absolutely cheating.”

“You think everybody’s cheating.”

“Because everybody usually is.”

“You’re impossible.”

Pedro looked over at me then, eyes crinkling behind the stupid paper Burger King crown he’d found in the bottom of the bag and immediately decided to wear for the night.

I thought to myself: There he was.

The version of him I’d been missing so badly it physically hurt.

Not actor Pedro, not the public celebrity Pedro, or the friend people liked. Here he was just my boyfriend being ridiculous in a hotel room while eating fries in bed.

I laughed hard enough at one point that soda nearly came out of my nose, which only made Pedro laugh harder until both of us were half collapsing against each other under the blankets.

By the middle of the second episode I was stretched across his chest listening to his heartbeat while he played absently with my fingers between commentary about the show.

Every now and then he’d kiss the top of my head without interrupting whatever deeply serious opinion he had about reality television politics.

The ease between us started returning slowly after that.

Small pieces here and there, like the way my body stopped hesitating before touching him. The way he automatically tucked my feet beneath his legs because he knew they were always freezing. The way silence stopped feeling dangerous again.

Later, when we showered together, it felt less like passion and more like muscle memory returning.

The kind built slowly over months of shared hotel rooms and exhausted set nights.

I washed shampoo from his curls and after a while he stood behind me with his chin resting against my shoulder, warm water running down both of us while steam filled the tiny bathroom until the mirrors disappeared completely. At one point he reached around me to grab the soap and kissed the side of my neck absentmindedly in the middle of the movement, like his body had finally stopped second-guessing its way back toward mine.

There was something deeply intimate about that more than anything else.

The normalcy of it.

Knowing exactly how he liked the water temperature. Knowing he always forgot towels until the last second, or that he’d complain dramatically about hotel shampoo while still using half the bottle.

Almost a year together and loving him had settled into my body in hundreds of tiny habits I didn’t even notice anymore until I thought I might lose them.

By the time I stepped out of the bathroom, my skin was still warm from the shower and the room had gone soft and dim with only the bedside lamp left on.

Pedro was already back in bed in grey sweatpants, no shirt on and his glasses for the last time that day just to have a look at me. He was stretched against the pillows with his iPad balanced on his stomach.

The sight of him hit me with this sudden overwhelming wave of affection so strong I had to stop for a second.

Domestic looked stupidly good on him.

He glanced up immediately when I walked out wearing one of his old shirts, towel still draped around my shoulders while I rubbed at my wet hair.

“There she is,” he murmured.

The way he said it made warmth spread low in my chest.

“You planning on coming back to bed tonight,” he asked, “or have you decided to abandon me emotionally for European cinema?”

I snorted.

“That depends. Is Burger King Crown Pedro still with us?”

“Always.”

“Then maybe.”

Pedro smiled slowly at that, eyes warm behind the glasses.

I was halfway across the room toward him when my phone buzzed loudly on the desk.

A calendar reminder.

My stomach dropped immediately.

“Oh shit.”

Pedro lowered the iPad slightly. “What?”

“The Berlin call.” I grabbed my phone, already wincing at the time. “Fuck, I forgot this was tonight.”

Recognition crossed his face immediately.

“That one you told me the other day?”

“Mhm.” I exhaled slowly, reaching for my laptop now. “The Cannes director’s on the call.”

For a second I genuinely considered cancelling.

Not because I didn’t want the project.

Because after the last few days, sitting in this warm hotel bed beside him suddenly felt dangerously easy to get attached to.

The idea of talking about Berlin while his side of the bed was still warm behind me made my chest tighten in ways I didn’t fully want to examine yet.

Pedro watched me quietly for a second before setting the iPad aside.

“You should take it.”

I looked over at him.

“You sure?”

“Baby.” His voice softened immediately. “This is important.”

He cares about it, and that somehow made me love him even harder.

I settled at the little table near the window while Pedro switched the bedside lamp off, leaving the room lit mostly by the glow of my laptop screen.

The call connected almost immediately.

Three faces appeared onscreen.

The director first — sharp cheekbones, silver jewelry, impossibly cool in that effortless European way that should’ve been annoying but somehow wasn’t.

Beside her small window, sat the producer, older, calm, wearing round glasses and a sweater that probably cost more than my monthly rent.

And then there was this guy from crew already on board for the project.

He has curly dark hair, with headphones crooked around his neck. Camera equipment stacked behind him like he’d forgotten he was supposed to look professional before joining the call.

The second he saw me appear onscreen, his entire face lit up.

“Oh thank fuck,” he said immediately. “You’re real.”

I blinked, caught off guard enough to laugh.

The producer sighed. “Harry’s been talking about your work for two weeks straight.”

“Because it’s incredible,” Harry cut in without shame. “Sorry, but the winter stills from that show ‘All that Remains’?” He shook his head dramatically. “Insane. I genuinely got angry after seeing them.”

I laughed again, embarrassed now.

Pedro glanced over from the bed at the sound, smiling faintly to himself before going back to pretending he wasn’t listening.

The conversation flowed easily after that.

They talked about the project for nearly an hour — the visual language they wanted, the intimacy of the story, the way they envisioned photography existing alongside movement instead of behind it.

Harry, especially, kept asking me questions about framing and emotional composition with the kind of intensity only another visual obsessive could have. He was the main camera for that project, dealing with all the technical part of the project.

At one point he actually got up to grab printed screenshots of my work from somewhere off camera.

“I told them there’s loneliness in your framing,” he said while holding one of the stills closer to the webcam. “But it’s never cold. That’s the thing. Your images still feel… loved.”

The comment hit the artist ego beneath myself. Because that was exactly what I was always trying to do.

Even in grief. Even in isolation. Find the humanity inside it.

By the time they started discussing logistics, my stomach had tightened completely.

Three months.

Berlin.

Meetings starting in June, right when we were going to shoot the last scene for this show.

A whole future unfolding in front of me while Pedro lay ten feet away in bed wearing glasses and waiting for me to come back under the blankets beside him.

When the call finally ended, I sat there for a second staring at my own reflection in the black laptop screen before slowly closing it.

The room felt quieter afterward.

Heavier somehow.

I turned toward the bed.

Pedro was still awake, lying on his side now with one arm tucked beneath his head watching me through the dark.

“You heard all that?”

“A little,” he admitted. “That guy Harry seems emotionally obsessed with you.”

I laughed softly despite myself and finally climbed back into bed beside him, immediately curling into the warmth of his body beneath the blankets.

Pedro took his glasses off, and opened his arm for me automatically.

The movement was so familiar now neither of us even thought about it anymore.

For a while he just played slowly with the damp ends of my hair while I listened to his heartbeat beneath my ear.

Then quietly:

“Three months is a long time.”

“Yeah.”

I tilted my head enough to look up at him. “You think I should do it?”

Pedro stayed quiet for a second before answering, his fingers still moving lazily through my hair.

“I think if you turn something like this down because of me,” he said carefully, “eventually it’ll hurt us anyway.”

That landed deep because I knew immediately he was right.

His hand slid slowly down my back beneath the oversized shirt.

“And I think you’d be incredible there,” he added more quietly.

Emotion climbed into my throat so fast it caught me off guard.

This was the thing nobody outside us really understood about us: Pedro had never once asked me to become smaller so he could feel bigger.