Hawthorne, England — 1846.
The first time Kaelan saw her, she was standing in the doorway of the Hawthorne Textile Mill, her hair dusted with white cotton lint like snow. The dawn light had hardly woken the city, but the mill already roared—an iron belly demanding its daily sacrifice of bodies and breath. Workers streamed inside in thin lines, shoulders slumped, eyes dulled by years of exhaustion.
But she—She looked up.
As if instinct pulled her gaze toward the stranger standing across the street.
And Kaelan, who had come to Hawthorne only to study labor conditions for his research paper, felt a strange blow in his chest. He'd seen thousands of faces during his travels—tired, hopeful, desperate—but none had ever made him freeze in place like this.
Her eyes were dark and bright all at once, like polished river stones warmed by the sun. She held his stare for a second longer than any woman should. Then she disappeared into the bowels of the mill.
A single breath of air lingered between them.
Something inside him whispered:
There you are.
He did not understand why.But it felt like recognition.
The City
Hawthorne was a city built of soot and ambition. Its cobbled streets were always wet, its skies dimmed by chimneys, its factories loud enough to drown a man's thoughts. Yet people flocked there in endless streams, lured by the hope of wages, meager, but dependable.
Aria was one of them.
She lived in a narrow boarding house with other women: seamstresses, dyers, ironers, and girls too young to work but old enough to worry. Aria worked from sunrise to sunset in the spinning room, where the machines clattered so loudly she could feel the vibrations in her bones each night when she lay down.
And yet…
She dreamed of something she could never name—an ache she carried since childhood,a longing for a face she had never seen,a voice she could almost hear.
She always assumed it was foolishness.A symptom of fatigue.
Until the morning she saw him standing across the street.
The stranger with ink-stained fingers and a satchel heavy with books.The stranger who stared at her as though he had been looking for her.
Her pulse had tripped inside her chest.She didn't know why.She only knew she had seen that face before—not in this life,but somewhere deeper.
Kaelan wasn't the type to lose his focus. His tutors often called him obsessive, driven, unshakably disciplined. But that morning, instead of continuing toward the Workers' Union office, he found himself standing where she had stood, peering at the open factory doors.
Heat gusted from within, the heat of thousands of bodies, hundreds of machines, and the frenetic heartbeat of industry.
He heard a cough behind him.
You'll choke if you stand 'ere too long, said an older man, hauling sacks of wool. Air's bad enough for them that work inside, bad enough to kill a man.
Kaelan nodded, though he wasn't listening.
Who was the girl at the door? he asked without thinking.
The man snorted. Which one? They're all the same in there, lad. Sweat, cotton, and fear.
Kaelan frowned. No. Not the same.
He didn't say more, because how could he explain that the moment he saw her, the world had shifted? As if he had stepped into a river he had crossed many times before.
Inside the mill, Aria moved quickly and precisely, wrapping raw cotton onto spools, feeding the spinning frames, avoiding the deadly snap of breaking threads. The overseer walked the aisles with a leather strap in hand. She kept her head low, but her mind was elsewhere.
She kept thinking about the man outside, the warmth in his gaze, the way her breath had caught, the wild, inexplicable sense of familiarity.
Get a hold of yourself, she scolded silently, he's just a stranger. But even as she forced her attention back to her work, her heart tugged in another direction, toward him. Toward something she did not understand, toward something older than memory.
When the factory bell rang at the end of the day, Aria stepped outside into the orange glow of sunset, her body aching from the long hours.
She didn't expect to see him again, but he was there.
Leaning against a lamppost, watching the workers stream out and when he saw her... her, specifically, he straightened, his breath catching as though he had been waiting for her alone.
Aria froze in place.Their eyes met again.
The world seemed to dim around them.
The noise of carts, machines, shouting workers, everything faded.
He took a slow, almost reverent step toward her.
Hello, he said softly, as though greeting someone he had known all his life.
Aria swallowed, her voice trembling.
H…hello.
She didn't know him, and yet her soul whispered the truth:
I've found you again.