You spoke like someone remembering a place you'd never been.

You hadn’t noticed, not at first, how still he’d gone. His elbows resting on the marble railing of the Waterloo Bridge, his head angled toward you but his eyes on the Thames—black and thick and slow, as if it too had stopped to listen.

You kept talking, unaware you were telling him something dangerous. “I keep having the same dream,” you said, warming your fingers on the tin cup of cheap tea he’d insisted on buying from a vendor who looked like he hadn’t moved in a hundred years. “There’s this staircase. Stone, I think. Worn. Wet like it’s underground. And I’m running down it in bare feet. My nightgown’s torn.”

That’s when he looked at you. Not just turned, but looked. The way a priest might look at a woman who’d just confessed to something he didn’t believe humans were capable of.

You tried to laugh it off. “Freud would probably say it’s sexual repression.”

But Vlad didn’t laugh. He said your name like it was something old and ceremonial. And then, softly, “What else?”

You hesitated. Your fingers found your wrist, where the pulse beat like a guilty thing. “There’s... lace. Blood on it. Someone’s screaming, but not out loud. It’s like the scream is inside me but I can’t get it out. And then a battlefield. It’s snowing. The blood looks black in the snow.” You paused. “I don’t even know where I’ve seen snow.”

He stepped away from the railing. His gloves creaked. He looked younger suddenly, but not in the way you’d expect—less like a man rejuvenated and more like one disarmed. Exposed. Not fragile, but breakable. "Those things happened," he said. “To her.”

You blinked.

“To Elisabeta.” The name felt like a bell tolling at the bottom of a lake.

You’d heard it before. Of course you had. He’d spoken of her like one might speak of a country lost in a war they still weren’t sure had ended. Reverently, but distantly. A theory more than a woman. Until now.

You shifted your weight, uncertain. “So… what? You think I’m her?”

“I don’t think,” he said. “Thinking is for men with options.”

You smiled, faintly, because his accent always made anger sound like poetry. “And what do you do, then? Just feel?”

“I wait.”

He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that for a moment you hated him for it. Not because he’d waited for her. But because he thought waiting was enough. Like your life—your real, messy, modern life—was just some long hallway he had to walk down to get back to someone else.

“I’m not her,” you said. Quiet. Firm.

He stepped closer. “You dream in her images.”

“I’m not her.”

He touched your face like it was a page he meant to read in the dark. “No. But perhaps you carry her echoes. And perhaps that is worse.”

You didn’t answer. A barge passed under the bridge and made the stones hum beneath your feet. London was loud and alive all around you—drunken laughter from the South Bank, distant violins, the rattle of carriage wheels—but here, in this pause between his silence and yours, the world felt embalmed.

You looked up at him. “What do you want from me, really?”

He didn’t answer. Not directly. He only looked at your cup, now cold in your hands. “Even that,” he said softly, “she drank her tea cold. Said it was braver.”

That made you laugh, despite yourself. “That sounds stupid.”

“I know,” he said, and smiled. “I loved her anyway.”

You looked away, eyes burning. Whether with sorrow or anger or some ancient emotion you couldn’t name, you weren’t sure. It was possible, you realized, to miss someone else's life. To feel the grief of a woman whose heartbeat might have once lived in your chest. You didn’t know if you believed in reincarnation.‎