London was colder than Boston, but quieter.

Michael Gray walked the city like a ghost in a well-cut coat—tailored, pressed, polished—but always half somewhere else. He moved like a man rehearsing detachment, someone who had built an entire life on trying not to flinch. Gina was in Liverpool, visiting some extended cousin or attending some social event she hadn’t bothered to explain. He hadn’t asked. He didn’t need to. Whatever she was doing, it was nothing he hadn’t already imagined in better clothes, better lighting.

He wasn’t supposed to be here.

Not on this side of the river. Not in front of the little gallery tucked between a closed florist and a butcher’s with blood under the tiles. He told himself it was coincidence at first. The second time, he said it was the art—modern installations he didn’t understand but pretended to. By the third time, the lie had rotted on his tongue. He came because of you.

You worked the front desk. No heavy makeup. No ambition in your eyes. Just quiet steadiness, sleeves rolled, a pen tucked behind your ear. You didn’t flinch when you looked at him, didn’t linger but did recognize him from newspapers whispers. You handed him a folded pamphlet with the day’s exhibits and turned back to your paperback. That, somehow, was the moment he began to unravel.

You weren’t trying to belong to the world he came from. You didn’t chase power or names or proximity to danger. You made coffee with oat milk. You walked to work. You had laundry hanging in the window and candle wax on your nightstand. You were clean in a way Michael didn’t know people still were.

He kept coming back.

Never at the same time. Never announcing himself. But you started to expect him.

The first time he kissed you, it wasn’t planned. It was raining hard enough to bend the gutters. You locked up, hood pulled low, keys clenched between your fingers. He stepped out from across the street, shoulders soaked, eyes sharp.

“You waiting on someone?” you asked, voice soft beneath the drumming rain.

“No,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Just you.”

He kissed you like a man starved of warmth but too proud to admit it. Like someone who only ever touched things he already meant to break.

You didn’t lean into him. But you didn’t pull away.

When you did, it was slow, breathless. “You shouldn’t come back.”

He nodded. Like he agreed. Like he would. But the next week, he returned. He tried to stay away, God knows he tried.

You didn’t bring up Gina. Didn’t ask about the coat that cost more than your rent, or the way he sometimes stared through the window like he was preparing to vanish. You let him sleep on your couch, his coat folded over the armrest. You let him kiss you again, and again.

He never stayed the night. You never asked him to. Sometimes, though, you’d wake up at three a.m. and find him still sitting at the edge of your bed, half-dressed, looking at your bookshelf like he was trying to read a life he never got to live.

He liked your world. Milk in the fridge. Socks drying on the radiator. He liked the softness, the way your body folded into his without expectation. You didn’t want anything from him but honesty—and he couldn’t even give you that.

Polly was gone. Tommy was unreachable. Gina had filled the house with noise and mirrors and a hunger he couldn’t keep up with. Michael had been trying to outrun grief, ambition, rage—everything—for so long, he didn’t know how to stand still. But with you, he forgot to run.

He never left clues. Never called. Never asked what this was. He touched you like a confession, like something sacred he didn’t deserve. You let him. Even when it hurt. He tried to stop. He did. But peace was addictive. And he hadn’t known peace since he was a boy in a field in Small Heath, asking why his mother hadn’t come for him.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said, voice low and raw, like gravel in his throat. “Be this. Whatever this is.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, exhaled. “Every time I come here, it’s like… it’s like I’m stealing something.”