It was the first of December.
Beth was lying in bed, the Oxford sky outside already dimming by mid-afternoon. She wasn't checking the news—not really. But somehow the headline found her anyway, through a trending bar, a whisper of the past in clean serif type:
"Actor Leon Troy Hospitalized After Coughing Blood in Central London."
She froze.
For a moment, her heart did something involuntary—a stutter, maybe. Not quite concern. Not quite nothing. Just… a feeling.
Then she rolled her eyes, set the phone down, and muttered, "None of my business."
But less than a minute later, she picked it back up.
There were no pictures inside the hospital. No ambulance footage. Just two photos: paparazzi-grade, yet almost too composed to be accidental.
In the first, Leon was leaning against Bar, one arm looped around her shoulders like he was at a film festival and not, reportedly, coughing blood. His other hand was raised in a lazy gesture—half-wave, half-no photos, please. His lips were parted in what could almost be called a smirk, and he wore sunglasses despite the cloudy sky. Always the performance, Beth thought.
In the second photo, Leon was captured stepping into the backseat of a sleek black car. The turquoise of his long-sleeved shirt glowed under the winter light, and the way the sunlight caught his wristwatch looked so precise that Beth half-suspected it was sponsored. If you didn't read the caption, she thought, you'd assume it was an ad for Rolex, not a medical emergency.
Bar, in both photos, looked more concerned than he did. Her brow creased. Her lips pressed tight. But even her worry had a kind of gloss to it, like a model reacting to mild turbulence in first class.
Beth closed the app. She sat there for a moment, staring at the blank ceiling.
No one had texted her. Not Leon. Not Aglaya. Not even Chris, who surely had seen it by now and was probably making a collage.
She lay back down, exhaling slowly.
Let him perform. Let him cough blood in sapphire linen shirts, on marble floors, beside women who never question the story he's telling.
And still, somewhere beneath the sharpness of reason and pride, a quieter voice whispered:
He doesn't look scared. He never looks scared.
That, somehow, worried her most.
That night, sleep did not come easily.
Beth lay curled under her duvet, the winter air seeping in through the old windows of the Oxford flat. The heating clicked once, then failed with its usual pathetic sigh. Her room was cold, but not as cold as the feeling in her chest.
She closed her eyes and tried to banish his face—the half-smile, the sunglasses, the raised hand. Tried not to hear the word hemoptysis echoing in the back of her mind. It's none of your business, she told herself again, like a prayer. Or a spell. But it didn't work.
Sleep took her eventually, but it was no mercy.
In her dream, she was walking a long white corridor, her shoes echoing hollowly against sterile tiles. The corridor had no windows, only doors, all closed, all identical. Behind each one, she knew, something waited—something awful. Somewhere behind one of them was Leon. Or someone who used to be him.
She opened a door, and inside: a velvet-draped ballroom filled with smoke, empty champagne flutes, and a piano dripping blood down its keys. A ring sat abandoned on a stool.
She turned.
Aglaya stood in the hallway, barefoot, wearing red. "He forgets everyone," she said casually, twisting a match between her fingers. "Even himself, eventually."
Another door creaked open. Behind it: a hospital bed, white sheets spotted with red. A figure coughed—a violent, wet sound—and turned his face toward her. Leon.
Except he wasn't smiling. He looked pale, eyes sunken, shirt wrinkled and soaked through. He said her name.
Then another voice: "You said it was none of your business."
She woke up choking on air, her hands clenched in the blanket, her body damp with sweat. Her heart was racing as if she'd run a mile through fog.
The room was still. Dark. Quiet. And empty.
Beth lay back, staring up at the ceiling, the nightmare still a drumbeat in her head.
She didn't cry.
But she also didn't sleep again.
At 4:12 a.m., with her blankets tangled around her legs and her throat tight with unshed emotion, Beth gave up the act of pretending she didn't care.
She sat up, turned on her desk lamp, and opened her laptop. The glow felt too sharp, too bright, like it was calling her out.
She typed slowly, deliberately, as if each word hurt:
"Leon Troy hospitalised London December 7 2007."
The search engine loaded a few scattered articles—mostly entertainment blogs, celebrity aggregates, a couple of image-laden tabloids that recycled the same two photographs she had already seen. Headlines screamed:
"Leon Troy Spotted Coughing Blood in London – On His Way to Hospital with Model Girlfriend Barbara."
"Scare for Twilight City Star Days Before Global Release."
"Fans Express Concern—But Troy 'Smiling Through It.'"
Beth's stomach twisted.
There were no official statements. No confirmation of the hospital. No mention of how serious it actually was. The articles speculated it might be a relapse of his ongoing lung condition—bronchiectasis, they called it, like some tragic literary affliction out of time. Others dismissed it as exhaustion, stress, overwork.
But she knew. She had seen the blood. Not in person, but in her dreams. And that was worse in some ways—because her mind added color where the photos did not.
She tried narrowing the search:
"Leon Troy hospital name London health December 7."
"Where is Leon Troy now 2007."
"Leon Troy medical emergency December."
Nothing solid. Rumors. A whisper on a forum that he'd been taken to a private clinic in Kensington. A speculative tweet from a fan account that he'd been "stabilised." A blurry picture posted at 2 a.m. that might have been him, or might have been any slender man in a coat under bad lighting.
Beth leaned back in her chair and stared at the screen, her heart pounding.
What am I even doing? she thought. I said I was done. I said I was better.
And yet—she copied down the name of the private clinic in Kensington.
Just in case.
The next morning, the sky over Oxford was ashen, the air biting with December's sharpness. Beth stood at the bus station, clutching a thermos of too-hot tea between her gloved hands, her eyes distant, unfocused.
She had jotted the name of the private clinic in Kensington on a scrap of paper now tucked in her coat pocket. She wasn't yet admitting to herself she'd go. She was just… waiting.
The bench creaked beside her.
A girl sat down—a little older than Beth, with a quiet, well-formed kind of beauty. Brown hair pulled into a low, neat ponytail, thick-framed glasses perched on her nose, and a book in her lap: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
For a while, they sat in silence. Just two strangers in the same chill. Then the girl glanced at Beth, offered a tentative smile.
"Waiting for the 10:45?"
Beth nodded. "Yeah."
"You too?" the girl asked, her tone casual, though there was something searching in her eyes.
Beth blinked. "Sorry?"
The girl hesitated. Then said, with forced nonchalance, "You look like you've been reading the same headlines I have."
Beth's pulse quickened. "What do you mean?"
The girl exhaled, as if relieved she hadn't misjudged. "I'm looking for someone. Leon Troy."
Beth's throat tightened.
"I'm Linda," the girl added. "Linda Halls."
It hit Beth like a wave—the name. Leon's first real love, he'd once mentioned. The girl he dated in sixth form, whose name he'd feared remembering in the park. And now here she was, in the flesh, holding a book about unbearable lightness and chasing rumors of a boy who forgot people like Beth forgot old birthdays.
"I'm… Beth," she said slowly.
They looked at each other—two satellites pulled into the same orbit, both tethered to someone who had never quite stood still.
Linda offered a faint, wry smile. "Let me guess. You're not sure why you're here either."
By noon, the cold had sunk into their bones, but neither Beth nor Linda turned back. Something unspoken tethered them together—a strange, reluctant solidarity born of shared confusion, curiosity, and perhaps a little leftover pain.
They boarded a train to London in silence, the rhythm of the tracks filling the quiet between them. Neither asked the other what they expected to find. Neither asked what they would do if they found him.
They arrived at the private clinic in Kensington—St. Genesius, the kind of place so discreet it had no sign outside, just brass initials on a polished door, and a lobby that smelled faintly of lilac and disinfectant.
At the reception desk, a woman in a slate-grey uniform smiled politely, though her eyes were brisk and knowing.
Beth stepped forward.
"Excuse me," she said, "we're looking for someone—Leon Troy. We heard he might be here."
The woman's smile didn't change. "I'm sorry, we don't disclose patient information."
Linda stepped in next. "We understand. But if he's here—could you just tell him that Beth and Linda came by? He'll know who we are."
There was a pause. A flicker behind the receptionist's eyes. Then: "I'm afraid there's no patient by that name registered here."
They both froze.
Beth leaned forward slightly. "You're sure?"
"I'm quite sure," the woman replied gently, but firmly. "If he were here, I still wouldn't be able to confirm it. But I can say that we have no one under that name."
The words fell like glass.
They thanked her quietly and walked out into the brittle grey of the Kensington street, the chill harsher than before.
For a moment, they stood outside the clinic, not speaking. Just looking at the door. The brass letters. The nothing.
"He's not here," Linda said finally, her voice calm, but hollow.
"No," Beth murmured. "He's not."
They didn't cry. Neither of them did. But something in the silence said he's somewhere else, and we were never meant to know where.
It was a quiet, painful kind of clarity.
Linda turned to Beth and offered the ghost of a smile. "Want a coffee?"
Beth looked at her, surprised. Then she nodded.
"Yeah," she said. "I do."
Beth sat cross-legged on the floor of Linda's flat, a steaming mug of tea in her hands, watching as Linda circled another clinic on a map spread across the coffee table. It was surreal—this makeshift operation to track down a boy neither of them was supposed to care about anymore. A boy they both did.
There was something strangely comforting about the quietness of Linda's flat. Cozy, cluttered. Books in stacks. Polaroids of friends pinned to a corkboard. A worn ballet slipper on a shelf next to a chipped mug that read Oxford Doesn't Care. Beth felt the tiniest pang of envy for Linda's self-possession, her honesty, her detachment that wasn't cold—but earned.
"We haven't talked since he graduated from sixth form," Linda said, tapping her pen against a small red circle near Marylebone. "That was, what… three years ago now?"
Beth nodded, listening.
Linda went on, tone flat but full of strange, encyclopedic intimacy. "He was exiled to London when he got a girl pregnant. He was only 14, snuck into clubs with a fake ID. Typical Leon. Charisma without brakes."
Beth blinked. "He was fourteen?"
"Mm. Got the girl to sign an NDA, from what I heard. Then his family pulled him out of the States. He'd been at Phillips Academy Andover for 9th and 10th grade. Yeah, the Andover. Didn't get kicked out, but they stripped his allowance and dumped him in London with a servant and a monthly check that barely covered oat milk."
Beth gave a short laugh, stunned. "And then?"
"He came to my high school," Linda continued. "He was 15. Pretended to be this backward, awkward countryside kid—acted like he'd never used a washing machine. I was a cheerleader. He used to sketch in the margins of his notes and quote Rilke when the teachers weren't listening."
Beth was quiet, soaking it in. This was a version of Leon she'd never seen. A more human, less ethereal boy.
"He never applied to university," Linda said bluntly. "At least, I don't think so. He went back to L.A. at 17. Got a role two months later—his family's doing. In Hollywood, 17 to 22 is your prime time to be a teen idol. He'd already been nominated for Best Supporting Actor when he was 12, back in 1999, so it wasn't like people forgot him. They just… waited for the scandal to cool off."
Beth's fingers tightened around her mug.
"They used Aglaya's money to fix things," Linda said. "Not that the Troys weren't rich. His dad's a wealth manager, his aunt—Aglaya's mum—is a marketing executive. Both Wall Street types. But Aglaya was the star. She is the star. The pop princess of the moment. Everything they did was about image—Leon's return, Aglaya's next single, the magazine covers. It's all been planned since they were three."
There was a silence. Then Linda said, almost gently, "You didn't know?"
Beth looked down. "Not like that."
Linda gave a little laugh. Not unkind. "Nobody ever does. Not until they've already fallen for him."
They both stared at the map in silence.
And Beth whispered, more to herself than to Linda, "He said he wanted to be loved for him."