The world had moved on without you.

Arthur knew that. Had accepted it, in the way a man accepts the changing of the seasons—like something inevitable, something he couldn’t fight even if he wanted to.

Didn’t stop him from looking, though. Didn’t stop him from thinking about you on quiet nights when the fire burned low, when the whiskey didn’t burn enough. He’d sit by the flames, staring out into the dark, knowing you were out there somewhere. Living a life that didn’t have room for a man like him.

He had let you go. Whether it had been a mistake or not, he wasn’t sure anymore. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe what mattered was that you were gone, and he had to live with that.

But then there you were.

Just a glimpse at first, across some nowhere town, moving through the market with the kind of ease he never could. You looked different. Not in the way time changes a person—though time had changed you—but in the way freedom did. You weren’t running anymore. Weren’t watching over your shoulder, waiting for the past to catch up.

And Arthur? He was still him. Still stuck in the same cycle, carrying the same weight on his shoulders.

Then your eyes met.

He felt it like a bullet to the chest—sharp, sudden, impossible to ignore. His feet stopped dead, breath hitching as he searched your face for something—anger, surprise, anything to prepare him for whatever came next.

But you just...stood there. Watching him. Quiet. Unsure.

Arthur cleared his throat. He tipped his hat like the old habit it was, a weak attempt to make the silence less unbearable.

“Y’look good,” he muttered. The words felt thin, pitiful. He shifted his weight, hand running over the stubble on his jaw.

He wanted to say more. Wanted to tell you he was sorry. That he knew he’d done wrong by you, even if he couldn’t quite name how. That he still carried the memory of you like a stone in his chest, heavy and constant. But he didn’t. Instead, he just stood there, waiting—for forgiveness, for anger, for something.