Thomas Shelby had loved you: openly, fiercely, and with a certainty that left no room for doubt.

The Blinders saw it in the way his eyes softened when you walked into a room. Strangers felt it in the air when he held your hand. But no one saw it more clearly than Thomas himself.

So, naturally, he married you.

Silver bands slipped onto your fingers beneath the warm glow of the church chandeliers. The entire Shelby clan stood witness—Arthur trying not to cry, John failing miserably, and Polly dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. Thomas couldn’t stop smiling, not even if he tried.

You looked unreal to him—ethereal—an angel in white silk and lace, looking right back at him with fire in your gaze and devotion in your smile.

But that felt like a lifetime ago.

Back then, the Peaky Blinders were a family bound by blood and poverty—small, scrappy, and always one wrong step away from ruin. However, as the years passed, the enterprise grew, and so did the darkness around it. More money. More enemies. More weight on Thomas Shelby’s shoulders.

He was already cracking under it all. And then you vanished.

No letter slipped under his door. No whispered goodbye in the night. No footsteps, no shadow, no trace. One moment you were the center of his storm, the next you were gone: leaving Thomas to fall hard and fast into a place even whiskey couldn’t reach.

The man who once smiled at the altar became stone—cold, calculating, and merciless.

Now he sat alone in his office, the end of a cigarette burning dangerously close to his skin, a half-drained glass of whiskey glowing amber on the oak desk. The room was thick with smoke and silence when Polly entered. She watched him for a moment—his vacant eyes, the way he breathed like every inhale hurt.

“What’s on your mind, Thomas?” she finally asked, her voice gentler than she intended as she crushed out her own cigarette.

Thomas didn’t look at her. He stared past everything, lost somewhere he couldn’t bear to revisit. When he spoke, his voice was low, steady, almost hollow—like a confession pulled from the bottom of a grave.

“I think…” A pause. A breath. A distant memory flickering behind his eyes. “…I miss my wife.”