Later that evening, after the gentle laughter in the hospital room had faded and Helena had fallen asleep—her hand still loosely curled in Amanda's—Chris and Jefrey were asked to step outside by their father.
Mr. Wilson stood in the corridor near the vending machines, his suit jacket creased, his tie slightly loosened. He looked tired in a way neither of them were used to seeing—less like the composed, practical man who managed accounts for a regional firm in York, and more like someone quietly unraveling.
He didn't speak at first. Just rubbed the bridge of his nose and glanced down the hallway, as though words might appear at the end of it to rescue him.
Then, finally, he said, "I need to talk to you both. Just the two of you."
Chris and Jefrey exchanged a look, serious now.
Their father sighed. "Your mum's treatment will be intensive. Chemotherapy, regular scans, specialists. She's got a good team, but it's not cheap. And our insurance—well, it'll cover the basics. Not everything."
Jefrey's mouth tightened. "How much are we talking?"
Mr. Wilson hesitated. "More than we've saved for. I'll be pulling from the house equity, my pension, some investment bonds. But it'll be... tight. For a while. Especially if this goes on longer than six months."
Chris, uncharacteristically silent, looked at his father with wide, earnest eyes. Then he spoke.
"We can help."
Jefrey nodded. "I can get part-time work. Maybe something in data entry. Or tutoring. I know some of the first-years at LSE who pay well for notes."
Chris chimed in quickly. "And I could pick up something freelance—tech support, websites, that kind of thing. Or I could work at church, help with admin. Even cricket season hires. I don't care what it is."
But Mr. Wilson shook his head, already firm. "No."
"Dad—"
"No," he repeated, his voice gentle but resolute. "You're both at university. That's what we've worked for. Your mother would be furious if you gave it up or let your grades suffer. We're a family. And families don't put the burden on the children when they can carry it themselves."
Jefrey looked like he wanted to argue, but Mr. Wilson raised a hand.
"I'll manage," he said. "We'll manage. Your job is to study. Do well. Make her proud. That's more help to her than any paycheck."
Chris swallowed. "But if it gets worse…"
"Then we'll talk," said Mr. Wilson. "But not now."
Silence hung between them. Not cold. Just heavy.
Then Jefrey said, very quietly, "We won't let her down."
Their father's eyes glistened briefly. He nodded.
"I know."
The hospital encouraged 24-hour stay—encouraged, but didn't require. Still, for the Wilsons, it was never a question.
Helena would not be left alone.
They came together in the hospital corridor outside her room, near the muted floral wallpaper and vending machines that buzzed too loud in the silence. Mr. Wilson wasn't there—he was in meetings, managing insurance paperwork, logistics, and the invisible weight that came with keeping everything afloat. So it fell to the four of them to build a system. A watchtower. A circle of presence.
They made a schedule, scribbled it on a notepad, then copied it into each of their phones.
Chris volunteered first.
"I'll take the night shift," he said quickly, trying to sound casual. "I'm basically nocturnal anyway, and—let's be honest—hospital coffee doesn't scare me anymore."
So it was decided: 12:00 AM to 8:00 AM. Chris would guard the night.
Amanda rolled her eyes affectionately.
"Then I'll be there when the world wakes up. 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. That way I can still run errands, see the doctors, and glare at Chris for not sleeping."
She would bridge the morning.
Beth, quiet but certain, offered next.
"I'll come from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM."
She didn't say why, but Jefrey glanced at her, then nodded—his gaze soft. He understood.
And Jefrey, steady and calm, claimed the rest.
"I'll take the 4:00 PM to 12:00 AM block. That way I'll be there when things quiet down again. And when visiting hours start to end."
And so the cycle was built:
Chris: 12:00 AM – 8:00 AM
Amanda: 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Beth: 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Jefrey: 4:00 PM – 12:00 AM
A full rotation. Each with their own rhythm, their own way of caring.
Chris brought movies on his laptop and whispered commentary when Helena was too weak to talk. Amanda did all the checklists—nurses, prescriptions, meals, schedules. Beth read to Helena in the softest voice, sketching beside her bed when she slept. And Jefrey? He simply sat and stayed—offering quiet hands and calm, answering questions no one had asked out loud.
It wasn't a perfect system.
But it was love. Measured in hours.
Beth stood frozen for a moment beneath the rustling leaves of the park's sycamore trees, her heart thudding so loudly in her chest she was sure someone nearby could hear it. The light was filtered, hazy, late-summer gold—and there, at the ice cream bar across the path, stood the figure.
Flat black cap pulled low. Sunglasses. Black mask. A glint of silver at his collar—the necklace. Slender. The letters O and Z, intertwined like a secret.
It couldn't be.
And yet.
He was dressed in a plain black T-shirt, shorts that revealed pale legs, elegant and lean, a wristwatch that looked too expensive for a casual stroll. He was speaking to the vendor in a low voice, indecipherable from this distance. The vendor laughed. He didn't.
Beth's cheeks flushed, hot and sudden, as if her body remembered something her mind wasn't ready to. The memory of a white ermine cloak. A cliff bathed in twilight. A hand, gloved, touching her cheek. That almost-kiss that had never happened.
Lenored.
Her rational brain kicked in quickly—It might not be him. You could be wrong. You're probably wrong.
Then came the second voice, colder: And even if it's him, he's Leon Troy. He doesn't remember you. He's back with Bar. Or someone else. You were a paragraph.
But still—but still—she couldn't move away.
Not yet.
She stood there, fists unconsciously clenched at her sides, watching him. He turned slightly to the side. His profile—sharp jaw, the way the cap dipped low over his face—was unmistakable.
He reached for the ice cream cone from the vendor and—casual, effortless—removed the mask just enough to eat. And in that fraction of a second, she saw it.
The mouth she remembered. The one that smiled like it was keeping secrets. The one that had nearly, almost, not quite—
Beth's breath caught.
He licked his ice cream like it was a routine, a prop, not food. Vanilla, classic, of course.
And then—he looked up.
She flinched.
Because he saw her.
Not a glance. Not an accidental brush of eyes. But a full stop.
A pause in time.
And the question now wasn't Is it him?
It was Does he remember?
And judging by the way he froze too—ice cream forgotten mid-air—it seemed like he did.
She looks familiar, Leon thought, standing half in sun, half in shadow, the vanilla ice cream melting slowly between his fingers. Quite pretty. Soft around the eyes. Not Terrisa, is she? Or Daria?
He squinted, leaning ever so slightly to the left for a better angle, trying to see past the filtered light and her uncertain expression. She hadn't moved. Just stood there, staring—not boldly, but not hiding either. Like someone caught between the impulse to flee and the inability to look away.
Please, God, he thought, heart skipping a beat, don't let her be Linda Halls.
That would be unbearable. Utterly awkward. That summer in London, when he was seventeen, the ridiculous blue uniform blazer, the whispered Latin lessons in the library, Linda's rose-scented lip balm and her trembling fingertips. That was his first real love.
The kind that made you feel like your heart was being written in cursive on wet paper.
Not that he hadn't dated before—he had. Kissed since he was eight. The daughter of one of his mother's friends, behind a curtain at a charity gala. He had lived in a constant state of flirtation, but Linda Halls had wrecked him. Not with tragedy, but with earnestness. She was all eye contact and poetry margins and talks about the soul.
He'd ghosted her in the end. Not cruelly. Just... quietly. Disappeared.
He blinked again at the girl in front of him now.
Not Linda.
He exhaled with actual relief.
Thank God.
Then—something clicked.
Not Terrisa. Not Daria. Not Linda.
Beth.
A hill. A walk. A sketchbook.
Norway. Reine. Cloaks and cliffs. That summer with the sun that never set.
The girl with the haunting blue eyes.
He froze.
The ice cream dripped unnoticed down his fingers.
Because yes—he remembered her now.
And somehow, that made him more nervous than if it had been Linda Halls.
Leon's mind raced in chaos, that strange, flickering uncertainty behind his eyes. Was it her? Was she the one I left the note for? His memory—normally razor sharp for dialogue, angles, lighting, and faces—blurred when it came to people he hadn't meant to remember.
So many girls. So many evenings. So many half-kisses beneath twilight suns. He remembered a cliff. A pair of haunting eyes.
Was that her?
He couldn't be sure.
There was no time to think it through. No time to rewind and filter memory like film footage. She was still standing there, still looking at him like she might dissolve into the breeze—or walk away forever.
Two choices, he thought. Pretend I don't know her. Or try something close enough to the truth.
Leon drew in a breath.
His heart beat just a little too hard for a casual encounter. He could hear it over the rustle of leaves and the gentle bustle of the Sunday park.
Then—with the kind of slow, precise grace he'd once been praised for in films he barely remembered shooting—he stepped forward.
Lowered his sunglasses.
His eyes, once violet in Norway's eerie gold light, were now a deep, unreadable green. Not soft. Not cold. Just unsettlingly alive.
He tilted his head slightly. The same way he always did in interviews when he was deciding whether or not to be charming.
And then, voice low and uncertain—but deliberate, he asked:
"…Did we meet in Norway?"
There it was.
A thread. A gamble. A reaching out—not in certainty, but in invitation.
He held his breath, just a little.
Because whether she confirmed or denied, whether she turned away or came closer—
What she did next would decide whether Beth became a forgotten summer detail…
Or the beginning of something else.
Jefrey, thought Beth, standing rooted in place in the park, sunlight dappling over the path, her eyes still locked on Leon's—if it was Leon. She wasn't sure what unsettled her more: his presence, or the tug it still had on her, like the gravity of a dream she hadn't fully escaped.
Jefrey is real, she told herself. He stays. He listens. He loves me. I love him.
She forced the words into her thoughts like pieces of a puzzle she wanted to believe in.
But the last part—I love him—wobbled even in the silence of her mind. It came out shaky, thin. Not false, but desperate. Like something held together by hope instead of certainty.
She bit the inside of her cheek.
Then, like a devil on her shoulder, came Chris's voice—clear, flippant, full of popcorn and sass:
"Jefrey is good. Just not Orlando Bloom level of gorgeous."
Beth nearly laughed out loud.
It was ridiculous. And awful. And maddeningly true in that way Chris always managed to be. Jefrey didn't arrive in clouds of perfume and enigma. He didn't walk like a poem. He didn't haunt.
But he was real.
He was the boy who took the late shift at the hospital. The boy who listened without trying to fix her. The boy whose hand had trembled in grief, not performance. The boy who had looked at her—not past her, not through her, but at her.
And yet… here stood Leon.
Mask in one hand, sunglasses dangling from the other, his voice low and uncertain.
"…Did we meet in Norway?"
And something in her chest fluttered again. Not the same way. But not nothing, either.
Beth swallowed.
She was standing in the middle of a moment that could become a story. Or be walked away from.
And for one suspended second, she didn't know which way her heart would go.