October 2nd, 1916
Somewhere near Ypres, Belgium
The mud had swallowed his boots again. Julian Thorne stood ankle-deep in the cold brown sludge, the sky pressing low with clouds the color of old iron. The war was in its third year, and he no longer remembered what silence sounded like. Even now, in the lull between barrages, the air hummed with an invisible tension, like the hush before a scream.
He reached inside his coat, felt the familiar edge of a folded piece of paper, and let his fingers close around it. He wouldn't read it yet. Not while Private Bell watched him with tired eyes, or while Lieutenant Marsh barked orders in the distance. But the presence of it—her words—was enough to steady him.
September 17th, 1916
Alderidge Estate, Kent, England
Dearest Julian,
I don't know if this will reach you. The nurse at the station said letters often disappear into the mud like men do, so I suppose it is an act of foolishness, or hope, or something in between, to write this at all.
I remember your hand on the gate that day. How you looked at me as if I were the last quiet thing in the world. No words. No goodbye. Just the weight of it all in your silence.
I don't blame you. If I'd spoken, I might have begged you not to go.
—Meg
Julian first met Margaret Alderidge under no poetic circumstance. It was 1915, and he had a cough that wouldn't leave him alone. She was just the nurse who checked temperatures and dispensed bitter syrup at a recovery station in Dover. At first, he thought she was indifferent. But it wasn't indifference—it was restraint. Her hands were careful, her face unreadable.
He wouldn't call it love, not then. Maybe it was a kind of recognizing. Like when two strangers glance across a train platform and something ancient stirs in both of them.
Letter, March 12th, 1916
Sent from the Front
Meg,
You'll laugh, but I miss the tea you made at the hospital. Weak, over-boiled, and always half-spilled by the time you handed it to me. But it was warm, and it was from you. I think of it now while we huddle in this hole pretending we still belong to the world.
Yesterday, Bell showed me a picture of his daughter. She has your eyes, which startled me. I wanted to ask if he'd ever met you, but it seemed mad. I suppose I'm seeing you everywhere.
Don't write back if it's too much. I know I'm no one to you. But I needed to speak your name aloud again. Even if only in ink.
—Julian
He hadn't meant to send it. But the cold made cowards of most men, and he'd grown tired of writing letters to a family that never read them. He folded the note in trembling hands and gave it to the courier with a shrug.
It would either reach her—or it wouldn't. Either way, he'd said what he needed to.
Letter, April 9th, 1916
Alderidge Estate
Julian,
You think you're no one to me. That would be convenient, wouldn't it? But I remember you, soldier with the crooked smile. You asked for more toast even when we had none. You helped the young ones hobble to the mess when your own leg was shaking.
I never thanked you for fixing the greenhouse door that winter. My mother thought it was the wind. I knew better.
I shouldn't be writing this. Proper ladies don't write to men at the Front. But I haven't been proper in a long time.
Come home, Julian. Or write me again, and I'll pretend that you might.
—Meg
The letters became a ritual.
Each week, he'd trace the shape of her words with his eyes. Her ink was steady, her sentences never sentimental—but there was warmth in the way she described the garden, or her worry about the boy next door who'd lost his arm to a plough accident.
He replied, always with more than he meant to say.
August 1916
By then, the war had settled into a brutal rhythm. Julian had seen men vanish mid-sentence. He had learned that boots on a corpse could mean survival for another day. And still—he lived for the letters.
One morning, under shellfire, he scribbled a line between commands. His hands shook, his ears rang, and yet his mind reached across the sea to her.
Meg,
If I told you I thought of your hair in the rain more than I thought of God, would you forgive me?
Yours,
J.
In Kent, Margaret pressed that letter to her chest. She said nothing, even when her sister asked who Julian was. The war had taken too many boys. She wasn't ready to name what he meant to her.
But every time a car pulled up the long gravel path, her heart dropped to her stomach—afraid it might be the news she feared, or worse, none at all.
November 1916
Julian was wounded. Not mortally—but enough to be sent back to London for recovery. He didn't tell her.
He wanted to surprise her.
But it was she who surprised him.
He found her at the hospital where he'd been transferred. Not waiting by a gate in a white dress—but bent over a bandaged boy with blood on her sleeve. She didn't see Julian at first.
And when she did, she didn't smile. She just walked toward him, slowly, as though he were some fragile illusion.
Then she slapped him.
Only once.
Then she wept.
They didn't speak of love. Not yet.
Instead, she brought him bitter tea. He recited half-remembered lines of Keats to make her laugh. In the quiet hours, she sat beside him and said nothing. That was enough.
They lived in the pauses between duty. She returned to her shift each night; he watched her go like it would be the last time.
But the war does not rest for love.
February 1917
He was declared fit for return.
That night, he found her sitting in the greenhouse he had once repaired. The panes trembled in the wind. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap.
"If I ask you not to go…" she said.
He reached for her hand, but she flinched.
"You won't," he answered.
"No," she said. "I won't."
They kissed only once. It tasted like salt and ash and unsaid things.
April 1917
Somewhere in France
Julian never wrote again.
The letters stopped not by choice, but by blood.
A shell had taken half his platoon. He survived—barely. For weeks, he drifted in and out of consciousness in a French field hospital, his right hand crushed, his lungs torn by smoke.
He could not write. He could not speak.
But every night, he saw her in dreams.
May 1917
Alderidge Estate
No letters.
Margaret waited by the window each day. Her sister stopped asking.
When the telegram came, her hands trembled so hard she couldn't tear the envelope open.
But it was not a death notice. It was worse.
"Private Julian Thorne, presumed missing. Status unknown."
She read it thrice. Then she packed her satchel.
And joined the Red Cross mission to France.
She found him six weeks later in a hospital outside Arras. His beard had grown in ragged patches. His arm was gone.
But it was his eyes that broke her.
The same quiet recognition. But no joy.
He had forgotten her name.
July 1917
Memory returned in fragments. One morning, she found him holding a torn scrap of paper. It was her letter from two years ago—the one he had folded into his coat pocket.
"You… fixed the greenhouse door," he said slowly.
She nodded, tears silent.
"You made terrible tea," he added.
They wept together that night.
But the war was not done with him.
Even broken, Julian insisted on returning to the front. They called him mad.
But he knew what he was doing.
One final mission.
One final letter.
August 1917
To be delivered in the event of death
My dearest Meg,
I lied. I remembered you the whole time. Even in the dark, even when I couldn't speak. Your name was the only word I could hold onto.
If you are reading this, it means I didn't return. I ask only one thing—remember me not as a soldier, but as the man who watched you laugh over burnt toast. Who loved you before he knew what the word meant.
You once said you shouldn't have written. That proper ladies don't send letters to men at war.
But you did. And in doing so—you saved me.
I go now, not to die, but to leave something better behind. Let that be my last thought: that in a ruined world, we found something unruined.
All my love,
Julian
September 1917
Alderidge Estate
The final letter arrived in a black-sealed envelope.
Margaret read it once.
Then again.
Then she walked into the rain barefoot, and buried it beneath the old oak tree he had once leaned against in a dream she told no one about.
She never married.
She rebuilt the greenhouse herself.
And every spring, a single white iris grew near the oak's base.
She named it Julian.
And never spoke of him again.
End.