Faded Truths

Chapter One

Hayden

Five years later

London greeted me with a cold that seemed to know exactly where to find me, slipping beneath wool and skin until it settled beyond the reach of warmth.

Winter moved through the city with quiet authority, wrapping itself around stone buildings, crowded pavements, and hurried strangers who passed beneath a pale sky without ever once looking up.

Among them, I moved like a man who had no business being there, carrying a name that sat on a guest list I should have declined long before the invitation ever reached my hands.

I had crossed continents for what was supposed to be little more than an obligation.

A professional appearance. A few carefully measured hours inside an auditorium filled with scholars, colleagues, and people whose lives would never intersect with mine beyond polite introductions and academic conversation.

It should have remained exactly that, contained within the safe boundaries of distance, routine, and professional courtesy.

The auditorium was already beginning to darken when I stepped inside, and the low murmur of conversation gradually surrendered to the expectancy that always settled over rooms like this moments before a program began.

Rows of occupied seats stretched toward the stage, filled with faces I did not recognize and had no intention of remembering.

My assigned seat waited somewhere near the front, untouched.

I remained near the back of the hall instead, my fingers resting against the folded program in my hand as though the thin sheet of paper could anchor me to something rational.

The moderator began the introduction and I paid no attention until the name appeared in the program resting between my fingers.

I had underestimated the universe’s sense of irony.

Edwina Rhodes

Who the fuck was Edwina Rhodes? My eyes remained fixed on the printed program, on these harmless letters that somehow carried enough weight to knock the air from my lungs. The name sat there in clean black ink, perfectly ordinary, and completely fucking wrong.

Edwina Rhodes was not Edwina Carter.

Or was she?

The question slipped into my thoughts with quiet cruelty and refused to leave.

I stared at the page far longer than any rational man should have, waiting for the letters to shift, to correct themselves, to become something familiar instead of this sharp, unfamiliar reminder that five years could apparently rewrite a person so completely.

My jaw tightened before I even realized it, the muscle locking hard beneath skin as that surname settled into my mind and refused to leave. Fuck.

Seeing her name on this list hurt far more than seeing her ever should have.

Five years had passed. Five fucking years.

More than enough time for lives to change, for old names to disappear into paperwork and signatures, for a woman to build an entirely different life somewhere beyond your reach.

Time had rewritten history so completely that the person you once knew existed only in memories that never stopped haunting you.

And still, standing there with that folded program in my hand, one thought forced its way above every other rational explanation.

Some other bastard might have put his name where mine had never been.

Seeing her five years later had not been part of my plans today.

Then she moved, and recognition hit with a force to hollow out my chest. Air caught somewhere between my lungs and throat, refusing to move as the world around me blurred into something distant and meaningless.

It felt as if the past had never truly left me, only waited in silence for the exact moment my guard slipped and broke me. It was her.

The distance between us ceased to exist. Time lost whatever authority it once held while the woman I had buried so carefully inside memory stood beneath the stage lights, alive, unmistakable, and changed in ways my mind had not prepared for.

Her presence carried the disorienting weight of something once lost and suddenly returned, something I had spent years convincing myself no longer belonged within reach.

My hands locked behind my back, fingers curling until they ached, and I remained exactly where I was because moving would have meant accepting that she was real. I still wasn’t ready to fucking do that.

She had changed. The long brown waves I remembered were gone, replaced by shorter hair that brushed her collarbone, dark at the roots and fading into pale blond ends that caught the light in a way that felt almost intentional without trying too hard.

The softness I once knew had given way to something more defined, her features sharper now, her eyes framed by carefully applied makeup that suggested control rather than hiding anything at all.

She stood differently now, shoulders firm, movements restrained and efficient, with none of the fragile hesitation I remembered, only a composure shaped by years I had not been there to witness.

She began speaking and her voice reached me across the hall, lower, more assured, stripped of hesitation, yet the cadence settled beneath my skin with cruel familiarity while my mind rejected coincidence even as my body accepted it without resistance.

Her eyes moved across the audience as she spoke, surveying rather than searching, acknowledging faces she did not truly see, and when they briefly passed over my section, I held my breath without meaning to.

She did not react, and the absence of recognition struck with greater force than recognition could have, because she continued speaking without interruption, her expression unchanged and her rhythm uninterrupted. Fuck that.

To her I existed as another figure inside a darkened hall, while to me she remained the reason winter had never ended. To everyone else she was Edwina Rhodes, yet to me she remained the unfinished sentence my life had never learned to continue.

Applause filled the auditorium when she finished and people rose around me while I remained where I stood, because after five years defined by distance, silence, and forced forgetting, the truth revealed itself with quiet certainty.

I had not survived her absence.

I had only postponed the moment I would see her again.

She stepped away from the lectern with the same authority that had carried her through the entire presentation, accepting congratulations with a restrained smile before descending the stage and disappearing into the corridor that led backstage, her figure slipping from the light into shadow with a composure that unsettled me far more than any display meant to draw attention ever could have.

I did not follow at once. I remained where I was, letting the crowd shift and loosen around me, letting the low murmur of conversation rise again as attention turned toward the next speaker, allowing the room to settle back into something that resembled normalcy before I finally moved, because following her required a decision I was not yet willing to acknowledge, and I needed the illusion that what I was about to do had not already been decided.

The corridor beyond the main hall was quieter, narrower, lit by unforgiving white light that stripped warmth from the concrete walls, and I positioned myself against one of them as though I had chosen the spot by accident, my shoulder resting back, my hands loosely clasped behind me in a posture that suggested patience rather than anticipation.

I heard her before I saw her. Measured footsteps approached with unhurried confidence, the sound of heels striking the polished floor in a rhythm that belonged to someone who no longer questioned her right to occupy space.

Her focus remained on the documents she was reorganizing, her thumb scrolling absently across her phone screen as though the world ahead of her required no inspection, as though the past did not stand waiting in plain sight.

I watched her approach without announcing myself, close now to see the sharpened angles of her face beneath the fluorescent lighting.

She was almost past me when I spoke.

“Miss me,” I said, my voice lower than usual, roughened in a way I made no effort to soften. “My little Flare?”

The words cut through the space between us and something shifted immediately.

I felt it in my chest, sharp and sudden, making me tense before I could stop it.

Her jaw tightened and her shoulders pulled back, her body bracing as if she expected something to follow.

That reaction struck deeper than it should have.

Fuck.

She faltered for a second, and the documents in her hands slipped before she caught them, the soft sound breaking the silence between us.

It was quick, almost careless, but it gave her away.

I saw it happen, the brief crack in her composure before she forced herself back under control, the same way she used to when something got too close.

Then she said my name.

Not the way she used to say it. She chose the formal version, her tone distant, controlled, placing space between us as if that distance could rewrite what had been there before.

It shouldn’t have mattered. It did. And it pissed me off more than I was willing to admit.

“Professor Stone.”

Not Hayden. Just a professor now. That was all I was to her.

The way she said it settled wrong, colder than it should have been, and it got under my skin faster than I cared to admit. A faint, humorless smile touched my mouth.

“PhD candidate now,” I said, my gaze dropping briefly to the conference badge resting against her chest before returning to her eyes. “Congratulations.”

She did not thank me.

Up close, I could see that composure on her was no longer fragile. It had hardened into disciplined, earned through years I had not been allowed to witness, and yet beneath that control I detected the faintest tremor in her breathing that betrayed the fact that my presence had not gone unnoticed.