Page 146 of The Words Beneath the Noise

He leaned in, pressed his forehead to mine, and we stayed like that while the ward settled into quiet around us. Ruth'sbreathing evening out in sleep, the distant murmur of nurses in the corridor, the tick of the clock marking time we'd stolen from the war's grinding maw.

“Bona to vada you,” Tom whispered against my temple. “Good to see you. Always good to see you.”

“Naff off with the sweet talk,” I said, but my voice was thick with emotion. “You'll make me cry in front of Ruth.”

“Can't have that.” Tom pulled back just enough to look at me properly, his smile soft and private. “Rest now. I'll be here when you wake.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I closed my eyes, Tom's hand warm in mine, and for the first time since the bombs fell, I let myself believe we might actually survive this. Not just the war, but everything that came after.

Together.

Whatever that looked like, wherever it took us, we'd face it side by side.

The code that saved us wasn't written in German intercepts or mathematical patterns. It was written in Polari whispered in the dark, in promises made over a battered Black Book, in the choice to keep reaching for each other even when the world said we shouldn't.

We saved them.

Now we'd save ourselves.

WINTER WITHOUT SIRENS

ART

December 1946

Snow fell on London like forgiveness.

Not the ash-grey slush of wartime, churned to mud by boots and blood and bombs, but proper snow. Clean and white and silent, drifting past the window of our third-floor flat in lazy spirals that caught the streetlight glow. I stood watching it accumulate on the sill, one hand braced against the cold glass, and tried to remember the last time I'd seen snow that wasn't a backdrop to terror.

December 1944. The estate. Bombs falling while Tom pulled me from the wreckage and I'd told him I loved him with dust in my mouth and the certainty we were both going to die.

We hadn't died. Somehow, impossibly, we'd survived.

“You're doing that thing again,” Tom said from somewhere behind me.

I glanced back. He was sprawled on our battered sofa, one arm draped over the back and his stockinged feet propped on the trunk we used as a makeshift table. His hair had grown out since demobilisation, curling slightly at the ends in a way that madehim look younger, less haunted. He wore an old jumper with holes at the elbows and trousers that had seen better days, and he was beautiful in the way ordinary things were beautiful now that we had the luxury of ordinary.

“What thing?” I asked.

“The brooding at windows thing. The cataloguing ghosts thing.” Tom's mouth quirked. “Want to tell me what you're thinking about, or should I guess?”

“The estate. The bombing.” I turned back to the window, watching my breath fog the glass. “How different the snow looks now.”

Tom was quiet for a moment. Then the sofa creaked and his footsteps crossed the room, solid and familiar. His arms came round my waist from behind, chin hooking over my shoulder, and I leaned back into the warmth of him.

“It's been two years,” Tom murmured against my temple. “War's over. We won. You're allowed to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I know.” I did know, intellectually. Germany had surrendered in May of '45, Japan in August. The war was done, finished, relegated to newspapers and memorial services and the occasional nightmare that had me waking in a cold sweat. But some part of my brain hadn't quite accepted it, kept waiting for sirens that never came, kept bracing for bombs that would never fall.

Tom's arms tightened. “What do you need?”

That was his question now, the one he asked when he saw me spiralling. Not “are you all right” because we both knew the answer to that was complicated, but “what do you need” which was actionable, grounding.

“Distraction,” I said. “Tell me what you've been working on.”