“Elise,” he started, and she laughed as Louis blinked back at them. “I have a son?”

“You do. His name is Louis, for my brother.”

Harry’s arms were open and he dropped to both knees as Louis slowly, tentatively, walked forward.

“Louis, this is your papa,” Elise said, switching to French as she waved him over. “Come and say hello. Your papa has come home!”

Louis took a few more steps, glancing at his mother before the biggest grin she’d ever seen spread across his face as he sprinted and then launched into his father’s arms. Her usually shy little boy almost knocked Harry clean off his haunches, but he righted himself and managed to stand with Louis in his arms. Arms that were bone-thin, but still had enough strength to hold his son.

“I never thought I’d see this day. I never thought for a moment that you could have survived, that you’d make it,” she said, crying now as she embraced Harry, wrapping her arms around the man she’d mourned for and yet still loved for so many years, and the little boy she’d fought so ferociously to protect from the minute she’d discovered she was pregnant. She’d never, ever let herself believe that Harry could be alive, not after all the loss she’d suffered, not after Adelaide.

“Well I’m here now, and I never intend on leaving you again,” Harry whispered, his lips pressed to their son’s head now. “And to think I had this little man waiting for me, too. I only wish I’d known.”

Elise slipped her hand into his then and led him inside, her heart fuller than it had been in as long as she could remember.

An hour later, when Harry had eaten a small meal and Louis was contentedly playing with his toy truck in the living room, Elise sat beside the bath on a stool as Harry lowered himself into the warm water. She’d clipped his beard with scissors before he’d undressed, and now that he was lying, head back and eyes closed, she soaped his cheeks and used a blade to shave him. At first she was hesitant, not wanting to cut him, but the more she slid it across his skin, the more confident she became and slowly, before her eyes, her Harry started to appear.

They never said a word as she soaped his back and washed his hair, carefully trailing her sponge across deep scars that hadn’t been there when she’d last touched him, his bones protruding as if he’d been starved for months, if not years. When she was finally done, and steam had long since stopped rising from the water, she stood and reached for a towel, holding it out to him as he stepped from the bath.