I don't recognize England when I return, not straight away. The coast is grey, but quieter than France, no gunfire, no sirens, no screams muffled by sand. But it’s not peace I feel, it’s something colder, quieter, like the silence after a funeral.

I ride in the back of a lorry for half the journey, packed between sacks of grain and a silent man with eyes worse than mine, I walk the rest. Days blur together, my uniform’s no longer proper—the collar’s torn, buttons missing, my boots are falling apart. I’ve lost weight, I haven’t seen myself in a mirror since I left Dunkirk, but I know what I must look like.

The lads would call me mad, a deserter, coward, even. But they didn’t read your letter. They didn’t feel the earth shift beneath their feet like I did when I read “I’m pregnant, Alex.”

I’d already seen too many boys die on that beach, good lads, kind ones, faces I still see when I close my eyes. I didn’t want to be next, not with you waiting, not with a child on the way who might never know my name if I stayed. So I ran, not from war, but toward something worth living for.

I follow the long road back to town and every step feels like walking through a dream I might wake from or a nightmare, I don’t know which. Half the streets are gone, bombed, gutted. I pass Mrs. Downing’s bakery or what’s left of it. The house where we kissed for the first time after a late night walk? Ash. Nothing left but brick bones and blackened beams.

My throat closes.

Please, not you, not our child.

I walk faster, pushing through the broken town like a ghost. I reach your street and there it is, our little stone house your uncle gave us after the engagement. The curtains are drawn, the garden’s wild, but alive, and the windows unbroken.

I raise my hand to knock and my fingers tremble.

What if you’ve moved on? What if I’m too late? What if I died over there and this is some cruel trick my brain is playing as it fades into nothing?

The door opens and there you are. Hair longer than I remember, a cardigan too big for you wrapped around your shoulders and your eyes wide and wet, like you've seen a ghost and can’t decide whether to scream or hold it.

You don’t speak, you just look at me and then you’re in my arms.

We collapse into each other like the house might fall if we let go. You’re sobbing into my chest and I’m holding you like I never want to let you go again.

“I thought you were dead” you whisper.

I pull back just enough to look down at you, my hand finds your belly without asking, resting there like it’s the most sacred place on earth.

“It’s real?” I ask.

You take my hand and press it harder against the curve that wasn’t there when I left “About four months.”

I breathe for the first time in days, maybe months.

“I left" I say “Deserted. I had to, I couldn’t- I wouldn’t die out there and leave you like this.”

You look at me then, really look, and I see it, love. Fierce, terrified, stubborn love.

I kiss you like I did that night two years ago, the night in the pub when we both drank too much and broke every rule, when you were just eighteen and I was a boy barely nineteen, playing at being older than I was. I remember how your hands gripped my shirt, how your breath caught, how we laughed afterwards under the covers like the world outside didn’t exist.

After that, I brought you flowers, daisies first, because roses felt too presumptuous. I’d save those for something grander and I did. On your birthday and on the day I asked you to marry me, down by the old train tracks where we first watched the sun set with our shoulders touching. I couldn’t bear to leave without knowing I was yours in name, not just in heart.

We didn’t know, then, what war would take from us.

But now, standing in your doorway, broken and alive and home, I know what it cannot take.

You, us, this child.

I’ll go to prison if I must, hang, if that’s what they decide. But let them come, they’ll have to tear me away from you this time. And I swear, on whatever’s left of my soul, they won’t.