And now you do too.

Beth and I had three more children. We named them Ellie, Ben, and Harri, after the people who made their lives possible. We have never told them about their older brother and all he did for us. They don’t know about the sacrifice that made their lives possible. I suppose they will learn the truth when they read this book.

Honour your brother in your acts and deeds, children. Hold him dear in your memories. Think of him when you look at your own children. What he did echoes through the ages in the good that you do, and all the good that is done by those who come from you.

His legacy is boundless.

I don’t like to think of my boy alone, for even though it seemed he had company for a while, he raised himself. He shaped his destiny. He made choices as an adult that forced a life upon him as a child. I don’t like to dwell on my boy alone, lost, afraid, hurting. Seeing the universe so differently must have been nothing but a source of torment.

I don’t like to linger on that. I like to picture him as a brave spirit. I prefer to think of the years he spent with Harri, living in the Elsewhere House, happily growing old together.

He died shortly after meeting Harri in the bookshop, at the age of eighty-four, in a bed and breakfast not many miles from Longhaven. As far as I can tell, it was two weeks after he wrote me the letter that contained his last poem. There was no notice of his death, just a note in the church record that an Elliot Asha had passed away at the Three Horseshoes Guest House. He was buried in the churchyard at St Leonard in Ipstones, next to the grave of Anna Cecilia, mentioned by Harri in her journal.

I’m proud he chose to be buried using his real name and when Beth and I visit his grave each year, we can just about make out the faint outline of the letters in the weathered stone. Anna Cecilia’s inscription is almost gone.

I haven’t much more to say. Beth is calling me. We came here as refugees, and what career options are available to a person with no assets and little talent beyond the ability to spin a yarn? Our skills as physicists were useless in our new time. We were like Victorian railway engineers dropped in the world of silicon chips. So she retrained as a historian and I became a writer. There is a steady demand for historical fiction and as a refugee of the time of war, espionage, sickness, and poverty, I can draw on a lot of personal experience that is alien to my contemporaries.

So I’ve written my stories, and Beth has taught, and together we have built a life here. It is a world of wonder and possibilities compared to the time we came from, and not a day passes we’re not grateful for the sacrifice our son made.