“Elise,” the man called back, holding his hands in the air as if to surrender, showing her that he had no weapons. “It’s me.”

Me?

She squinted, lifting her free hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

It can’t be.

She studied his stature, the clothes hanging off his skinny frame, his long, unkempt hair. But as he walked slowly closer, his hands still raised, and she kept staring, something about his eyes stopped her from running for the house.

“Elise?” he said again.

His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn’t spoken in a long while, but the way his warm brown eyes shone, she just knew.

It’s Harry.

“Harry?” she whispered, no longer used to his name on her lips.

It was his smile that told her it was truly him, even disguised by a beard, even attached to a face so thin she could barely comprehend it was the man she’d once known and loved.

“Oh my God, Harry!” She let go of Louis’s warm little hand, running the last few yards between them and opening her arms. “Harry!”

When his arms closed around her, lips to her hair as she pressed her face to his chest and listened to the still-familiar beat of his heart, for a moment it was like he’d never left. Elise cried happy tears into his shirt, not caring that he was skin and bones, or that his tattered shirt smelt like it hadn’t been washed in years. It was Harry, and she’d take him any way he came.

“I can’t believe you’re alive.” She leaned back in his arms and stared up at him. “I can’t believe it. I just—” Elise blinked through her tears. “I just can’t believe you’re actually here, standing in front of me.”

“Let me look at you,” he said, stroking her face. “You’re the only thing that’s kept me going all this time, and I had this terrible feeling that I’d finally make it back to you and you’d be gone.”

She didn’t tell him about the bullet that had skimmed her thigh and almost killed her, or the knife wounds to her stomach; she could so easily have perished, but somehow, miraculously, she’d lived to see the end of the war that had claimed the lives of everyone she loved. Everyone, except Harry.

A shiver ran through her as she remembered her son behind her. “There’s someone I’d very much like you to meet, Harry,” she told him, smiling up at him as she turned, keeping one arm looped around his waist.

Before she could tell Louis to come closer, Harry cleared his throat and pulled away from her, dropping to one knee. She saw his mind working as he perhaps tried to figure out who the boy might be.