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Chapter Text

“Alright, alright!” Faith Howells protested, chucking her youngest daughter’s school jumper towards her head and biting down on a laugh as it caught over the back of Megan’s hair like a nun’s habit. The little girl let out a yelp of complaint as her siblings snorted with laughter, and Faith grinned as she shoved her arms into her coat, slipped her phone into her pocket, and headed towards the front door. She was in the middle of mentally running through her schedule – drive to the office, meeting with Cerys, tele-conference with a prospective client, lunch with Lisa – as she yanked the door open, frowning in confusion at the man stood on the doorstep with an apologetic expression.

It was odd; the moment the stranger saw her, he lit up. She’d always wondered about the accuracy of that expression, and yet there was no other way to describe it; he began to smile from ear to ear, his whole expression changing into one of absolute joy as he looked her up and down, and then his eyes filled with tears and for one awful moment she thought that he might be about to cry, and she felt an irrepressible urge to comfort him, to reassure him, to cheer him up. Why did the thought of an unknown man weeping affect her so intensely? Why should the emotions of this stranger bother her so much? She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but he felt… familiar, in a generic sort of way, she supposed. He was the same height as her in her heels, with dark hair and a kind face, but she didn’t know him – she was certain of that, even as she ran through her mental catalogue of faces in her mind’s eye and came up blank.

And yet… she couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew him, and he certainly seemed to know her, Faith supposed; random strangers didn’t tend to well up at the sight of a woman answering the door, not even if that woman did happen to be a sharply-dressed solicitor, mother of three, and one half of Abercorran’s most litigious custody battle in recent years. This man was looking at her with fondness, as though he knew her and cared about her, and Faith groaned inwardly as she wondered if he’d just come to gawp at her, or he was one of the time-wasting nutters (as Cerys had christened them) who tended to pass through the firm’s email account and phone lines like flotsam, begging for her attention and small chunks of her time, determined just to gawp at the sight that was Faith Howells, soon-to-be (she hoped) the ex-wife of Evan-who’d-been-to-prison, all of which was usually said in a rush, as though the only thing Evan had ever done had been being locked up. Perhaps that was going to be his legacy now; not their three children, or the firm she’d left so determinedly, or the house. No, he would be remembered for his crimes, and nothing more; Faith couldn’t tell if the thought made her want to laugh or cry.

“Hi,” the stranger said breathlessly in the North Welsh accent, cutting into her train of thought. “Hi. Wow. Hi. It’s… it’s good to see you.”

Faith raised an eyebrow, her attention half on this mysterious man and half on her daughters, who were now bickering loudly behind her about who would get to ride in the passenger seat of Arthur’s car on the way to school. She knew that strictly speaking Meg was too little to go in the front, and she thought about pointing that out, but there was something so sweetly vulnerable about her middle child at the moment that she couldn’t bring herself to, and besides… the stranger was still staring at her with the same warmth, the same joy, and the same absolute ecstasy that he had been some seconds prior, and it was starting to disconcert her.

“Hi,” Faith echoed, shoving one hand into her pocket and using the other to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Sorry, have we met?”

“Well, you could say that.”

“What…”

“Jack said this might happen,” the stranger continued brightly, as though that ought to make perfect sense to her. “Said it wouldn’t be instant, and I should explain.”

“Jack?” Faith asked, frowning in confusion. “Explain what?”

“My name’s Rhys,” the man – Rhys – said patiently. “Rhys Williams.”

He looked at her as though this ought to mean something, but it didn’t. Faith’s brain continued ticking over; she’d known a Rhys Cooper, a Rhys Jones, a Gethin Williams, a Ianto Williams, but never a Rhys Williams, and never this man. Of that much, she was absolutely sure, not least because she’d remember meeting a man who looked at her… well, how Evan had once looked at her, as though she were the centre of the universe, and nothing else mattered outside of the light that she cast. She felt a stab of resentment at the thought of Evan, and her mood soured a degree or two.

“I’m sorry,” she began politely. “I don’t…”

“Mum,” Meg said loudly, appearing behind her with Rhodri balanced precariously on one hip. This was getting harder to do as her youngest child grew older, and yet both girls still toted him around like an oversized doll when it suited them, happy to dress him up or read to him or watch Peppa Pig for the twenty-fifth consecutive time – although the last one often had to be coerced by her or Arthur with bribes of sweets or iPad time. “Mum, Alys says it’s her turn in the front seat again, and it’s not, she had it last time and it’s not fair.”

Faith turned towards her daughter and held her hands out for Rhodri, scooping him into her arms and pulling a funny face at him. She could feel Rhys’s gaze burning into the back of her head as she moved her son onto her own hip and then reached out her free arm to Meg, who came and cuddled into her side, staring over at the strange man at the door with detached curiosity.

“Well, my love,” Faith murmured, stroking Meg’s hair back and bouncing Rhodri a little, feeling oddly self-conscious as Rhys watched on. “Why don’t we let Alys have it today, and you can have it tomorrow – and if you’re a good girl, I’ll let you sit in the front when we go to Mam-gu’s, alright?”

“Alright,” Meg capitulated with reluctance, sticking her thumb in her mouth and heading back to the kitchen island and her bowl of Cheerios. Faith turned back to Rhys, who was staring at Rhodri with an expression of absolute shock, looking from him to Meg and then back to the toddler as though he’d seen a ghost.

“Is he yours?” he asked, and Faith let out a bemused laugh.

“I’m sorry?”

“Is he… are they…”

“What kind of question is that?” she snapped, now utterly convinced that this was yet another time-wasting nutter. “Yes, they’re mine, thank you very much. You sound like my bloody husband. What was it you wanted?”

“It…” Rhys dithered for a moment, then shook his head, eyes still as round as saucers. “Never mind. I’ll… erm, I’ll see you around.”

“Right,” Faith raised her eyebrows. “Sure. OK.”

For the next two days, Faith dwelled on the subject of Rhys. Who was he? He wasn’t local to Abercorran; she asked around and nobody seemed to know of him, and she couldn’t find any record of him at any of the local bed and breakfasts. A quick Google threw up hundreds of results, and she dutifully clicked through the first page of results, landing on an awful, dated webpage for a firm called Harwood’s Haulage, which noted that a Rhys Williams was the Transport Manager for the Cardiff region, but the site seemed not to have been updated for several years, and it could have been another Rhys Williams… one who didn’t gaze at her with something awfully akin to adoration, or look at her children with such shock.

Perhaps, she wondered, going about her day as best she could, he was someone Evan had met… well, during that time. Perhaps he’d fallen in love with the idea of her as Evan had described her, and been disappointed to find that she wasn’t a gangster’s moll or a rebel or a tearaway, but instead a struggling single mother of three, who was trying – and sometimes succeeding – to juggle work, childcare, and… well, everything else; all of those issues that she couldn’t tell anyone about, not even Cerys or Lisa.

Not even Steve.

Faith checked her phone every couple of hours, but he hadn’t been in touch; she shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet she felt a surge of disappointment each time she received a text and it transpired to be her mobile network, or Lisa, or her father in law, or a client. She wondered what Steve would make of Rhys; she half-considered asking him to use his connections to dig into the stranger’s life, but something held her back from doing so. She couldn’t shake the unusual feeling that she knew Rhys from somewhere, although she couldn’t possibly work out where or how or why. If the Harwood’s site was the right Rhys then she was baffled; she’d never spent much time in Cardiff, or North Wales, and something about him made her think that he was a bit of a homebody; that he liked to stick to his patch, and that coming to Abercorran was out of character for him.

Most puzzling of all was the fact that Rhys had seemed to know her. Faith was accustomed to that; accustomed to total strangers knowing everything about her, or thinking that they did because they’d seen her in the paper going into court, or looked up her profile on the firm’s website, or heard some second-hand gossip from Mrs Jones in the corner shop. But that was different; those people presumed to know her and exert their influence over her; they liked to show off what they knew, and try to lord it over her with their titbits of information and salacious ‘facts’. Rhys had spoken to her as though they had a shared past; he’d spoken to her as Evan would – the divorce notwithstanding – and spoken of ‘Jack’ as though she ought to know who that was, and as though the name ought to mean something to her.

It didn’t, of course. She hadn’t a clue what he’d meant, or who he’d been referring to. But she couldn’t forget the expressions he’d made; the absolute delight upon seeing her, or the borderline devastation at the sight of the children.

So, she wondered. Who was Rhys Williams? And why was he so interested in her?

“Well,” Cerys said with a smirk, coming into Faith’s office early on a Friday morning and holding out a black and red gift bag with a little flourish. “You could’ve told me you’d got a secret admirer and a leather fetish.”

“I’ve got a what?” Faith scoffed, her mind still on the email she was finishing typing. “What…”

Cerys set the bag down beside her as she pressed send, and Faith snatched it up as she rolled her eyes at her business partner’s smug expression. Peeling back layers of tissue paper, she was surprised and confused to find it contained a leather jacket; extracting it from the bag, she was even more perplexed to discover that it was her size, and that pinned to the lining was a small note in a rounded, almost-childlike hand.

Remember. R.

“What the bloody hell is this?” Faith asked, as though Cerys might know the answer, but she already had a sneaking suspicion who it might be from. “Why…”

“You know, I could totally see you in that,” Cerys noted, dropping into the seat opposite Faith’s desk. “Go on. Put it on.”

“No!”

“Put it on!”

“No!” Faith spluttered. “I’m not… why… it’s not…”

“Go on, try dressing like a rebellious human being for one day. Dress like the dirty, dirty criminal that you are.”

Faith shot her partner a filthy look as Cerys’s smirk intensified, but she found herself shrugging off her blazer all the same, unpinning the note and pulling on the strange jacket. It fit her perfectly, which was hardly unusual, she supposed; clothes were a standard size, after all, and this had been… what, a lucky guess, on Rhys’s part? And yet there was something familiar about the jacket; as she skimmed her thumb over a scuffed edge on one cuff, she fancied she could hear herself swearing about such a mark, and she knew how much it would bother her to have damaged such an expensive piece of clothing.

“Fucking hell,” Cerys said with a low whistle, as Faith got to her feet and went to admire her reflection in the window. “Are you sure you’re not into women? Because that… that is a look and a half. Bit of eyeliner and some hairspray and you’d be so my type.”

“Definitely not into women,” Faith noted absentmindedly, sticking her tongue out at Cerys in the reflection. “But if Evan tries to pull any more ridiculous stunts, I might take you up on that.”

“What about Steve?”

“Steve and I aren’t-”

“Right, and you’re not the hottest woman alive in that jacket.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I thought we were telling blatant lies.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“You love me for it, though. So, who’s the secret admirer?” Cerys asked, picking up the note and squinting down at the cryptic message. “How do they know what looks good on you?”

“I don’t know,” Faith lied, plunging her hands into the jacket’s pockets and staring at the stranger looking back at her. “I really don’t know…”

“Did it help?”

Faith was stood on the patio with a glass of wine, looking out over the estuary in the fading light, when the voice spoke out of nowhere. She might have jumped, and yet with all that had come to pass over the previous two years, instead she only took another sip of her rioja as Rhys Williams stepped out of the gloom and stared across the space between them with an unreadable expression.

“Did what help?” she asked measuredly, refusing to be drawn on anything.

“The jacket.”

“I thought that was you,” she laughed without mirth and took another sip of her wine, determined to let Rhys take the lead and force him to play his hand. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you here? I mean specifically here, not just in Abercorran.”

“Because it’s time for you to remember.”

“Remember what?” Faith asked, looking over at him with bewildered frustration. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want; I don’t know who ‘Jack’ is, I don’t know why you’re sending me clothes to my office.”

“Because you need to remember.”

“Remember what?!”

Rhys only looked at her sadly for several seconds, then asked in a flat, resigned tone: “Are those kids yours?”

Faith felt her entire body tense up; she took several steps towards him, raising her half-empty wine glass as though it were an offensive weapon and scowling at him with as much fury as she could muster. She could endure any manner of weirdness; she could put up with leather jackets and strange notes and bafflingly devoted facial expressions, but she was not going to be drawn on the subject of her children. She’d had enough of this from Evan; enough sly insinuations that they might not be his, and she hadn’t stood for it from him, so she certainly wasn’t going to stand for it from this stranger.

“What makes my children any concern of yours?” she demanded to know, her tone steely. “What makes you think they’re…”

Rhys began to laugh. It was utterly inexplicable; she was threatening him mere inches from his face, and that was… funny? She was growing more and more certain that she was right, and that he was just another nutter.

“What?” she demanded to know, resisting the urge to shout and swear at him. “What’s so bloody funny?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you angry,” Rhys said bafflingly, then took a step back, holding his hands up submissively. “It’ll come to you. I promise it will.”

“What will?!”

But he only shook his head and walked away from her, shoving his hands in his pockets as he headed back towards the road, leaving her with more questions than answers.

“Who was he?” Evan asked her in an accusatory manner, as their mediator looked between them with a sense of hopelessness. Faith wondered if he’d ever had to deal with a couple quite this at loggerheads before, or a couple in which one partner had spent time in prison for such crimes as Evan had; in Abercorran, it seemed unlikely. Upon receiving no reply, Evan repeated more aggressively: “Who was he, Faith?”

“I don’t know,” Faith told him frankly, as Evan held his phone out towards her with barely-concealed resentment. Onscreen, a grainy photograph of Rhys was on display; strangely, the mediator hadn’t felt the need to ask why Evan had been stalking her, which Faith considered a fairly important question, but she knew that if she was the one to ask it then she would only be met with more righteous anger from the man who had once been her husband, and was now jealous and possessive to the point of menace, treating her as though she were a particularly valuable piece of property rather than a human being. “He just turned up a few days ago.”

“What did he want?”

“None of your business.”

“You see?” Evan crowed, turning to their mediator, who looked almightily sick of both of them. Faith couldn’t blame him; he’d had to endure several hours of this, and she was sure that they weren’t paying him enough to put up with their bickering and underhanded verbal blows. “You see, she refuses to tell me anything, won’t cooperate with anything I do, and then has the audacity to tell me that I’m not a fit parent and that I can’t have joint physical custody. It’s an absolute joke… she’s sneaking around in the dark-”

“It was eight thirty.”

“-with a strange man-”

“We were stood on my patio, it’s hardly salacious.”

“-while our children were asleep, and she won’t tell me a thing about who he is or what he wants, and yet she has the nerve…”

“I don’t know what he wants,” Faith told him flatly. “Alright? I know this might be hard to believe, Evan, but unlike you, I don’t know everything.”

“You bi-”

“Alright,” the mediator said wearily, as Evan lurched to his feet, balling his hands into fists. “Alright, Mr Howells, sit down. This kind of behaviour isn’t helping anyone.”

“No,” Evan snarled, his gaze fixed on Faith. “No, it’s not, is it?”

The large, black SUV was perhaps intended to be covert. It had certainly seen better days; the bumper was scuffed and dented, and the vehicle was in sore need of a wash, something which was only emphasised by the dark-tinted windows and shiny finish. Faith half-wondered whether she might provide the occupant with some legal advice about the opacity of car windows and then bill them for the pleasure, before she realised who was sat in the driver’s seat. Marching over and rapping smartly on the glass, she waited as the window slid down before narrowing her eyes suspiciously at the driver.

“What are you doing here?”

“Hoping to see you,” Rhys Williams said at once, reaching over and turning down his music. “Sort of, anyway. Mostly hoping to see Anwen.”

“Anwen?” Faith frowned, not understanding. “Who’s Anwen?”

“My daughter,” Rhys told her, as though that ought to explain everything. “She goes to this school.”

“There isn’t an Anwen here,” she told him, mentally running through the small classes and wondering whether she might have missed someone, but there hadn’t been any new students since… well, since Angie Baldini, the previous year. “What…”

“It’s a long story,” he told her drily, the faint sound of You Do Something to Me filtering through the car speakers. “I won’t bore you with it. Have you remembered yet? It would help if you remembered.”

“Remembered what?”

From behind them, there was the sound of the school bell ringing, and then a cacophony of voices as youngsters spilled into the playground.

“Mum!” Alys called, and Faith turned towards her eldest daughter, surprised by how exuberant the pre-teen sounded to see her for once. “Can Angie come for tea?”

Beside Alys, Angie herself hovered; she looked curiously from Faith to Rhys and back again, then exchanged a look with Alys and bit down on her lip as Faith wondered how quickly this information would be fed back to Steve, and what he might have to say about the fact that she was talking to a stranger, and a strange man at that. Still, she supposed she was entitled to do that; she felt a sudden, dizzy rush of silliness as she wondered at what age one could stop worrying about stranger danger, and then realised that her daughter was waiting for an answer.

“Course she can, love,” she told Alys, who grinned languidly at her by way of thanks and then sloped off in the direction of the car with Angie in tow. Turning back to Rhys, Faith took a deep breath then asked again: “Remembered what?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rhys shrugged, turning the key in the ignition with a wry smile. “It’ll come to you.”

“What about Anwen?” Faith asked, as the SUV chugged into life. “I thought…”

“Long story,” he said, then wound the window up and drove away before she could say another word.

It was moments like this that Faith knew she was going to miss in the coming years. Meg was asleep against her right side, her hair spread over her mother’s shoulder as she curled against her for warmth, while on her left there was the small, slippery shape of Rhodri sprawled over her abdomen, his little hands meshed in her hair like he’d done since he was a newborn, as Alys lay beside the three of them, one hand resting on Faith, as though grounding herself while the rest of her seemed determined in the quest for independence. Faith looked over at her eldest daughter with sadness, wondering how long it would be before Alys would cede from her entirely and there would be no more nights like these; before the hand reaching out to bridge the gap between them was gone and there would be nothing left but fights and resentment, until the end of Alys’s teenage years would, she hoped, bring reconciliation, the scabbing over of old wounds, and a move towards healing.

Well, she supposed. More fights, and more resentment, because Alys was still entirely unforgiving of the fact that for several weeks, Faith had been determined to take Evan back and determined to make their marriage work. She was still too young to understand the intricacies of something as complex as marriage; still too young to understand the financial and romantic and practical entanglements that came with the piece of paper and the ring, and the fact that feelings could not be turned off like a tap. There would forever be a lingering sense of nostalgia in Faith’s heart for the man she’d fallen in love with all those years ago; an ache for the man he’d been then, and a yearning to return to simpler times. Perhaps she’d thought she could return to those times, she wondered; perhaps, alongside her desire to provide a degree of stability to her children’s lives that she’d never had, she’d also been caught up in the simple, selfish wish to return to how things had once been, and for Evan to return to who he used to be too.

It was, Faith knew now, an impossible ask. Evan could never be that man again; he’d been tainted by so much, and she didn’t know how to love who he was now, or how to accept the love he claimed to have for her, in between bitterly attacking her in mediation, viciously criticising her to the children, or vilifying her to his parents, their friends, and the sundry population of Abercorran. It was hard, she knew, not just for herself but for the girls, and she couldn’t help but wonder if they felt a sense of resentment towards their brother, who would remember nothing of any of this; he would only ever see his parents together in photographs, or hear about it in reminiscences, but it would be a strange thing, an intangible thing, an unimaginable thing. He alone, of the four of them, would be relatively untouched by Evan’s crimes, and his mother’s attempts to salvage the life they’d once had. He alone would be left without the deep emotional scars that her elder children bore, and the lingering resentment and fear which Alys continued to hold towards her father.

Faith couldn’t blame her. She remembered the depth and intensity of the bond between herself and her own dad; it was a bond like no other, she knew, that between a father and his daughter. It was a bond that encompassed every tiny fault or flaw; a bond that contained thousands of small jokes and asides and intricacies and understandings; a bond full of secrets that were so deep that a span of trust was built; a bond that no outsider could possibly ever hope to understand. Evan had shattered that; all of the faith and adoration and utterly unselfish love that his eldest daughter had had for him had been destroyed; Faith had watched her daughter – with her absolute sense of right and wrong, with a moral compass borne of two parents in the legal profession – wrestle with her morality and the memory of her father as he had been, and struggle to reconcile the two together until there had been an absolute breakdown, not only of her belief in Evan but in her sense of self.

Faith knew what that could do to a person; knew how it felt to carry guilt and shame around with you, how it felt to bear the stain of a parent’s misdeeds. She knew how it felt to wonder if that corruption, if that darkness, was in you, and she’d watched Alys fight the same internal battles that she herself had once faced, and tried her hardest to accommodate her eldest daughter’s needs alongside those of herself, of Evan, and of everyone around them. Even now, Faith saw the reluctance with which Alys would go along with her father and siblings at weekends; she saw the mistrust there, and she made sure that whenever she bid the three of them farewell to go on their excursions, she would make a private display of turning her phone volume up loud and placing it in her topmost pocket, so that Alys knew she would be reachable; that she was there; that she had the safety of being able to leave.

And then there was Meg. Meg, who felt everything so deeply; Meg, who even now would pretend to be alright for as long as her mother was looking at her, but the moment Faith turned away, she knew that the smile slid off her face and the brightness left her demeanour. She knew her middle child; knew the sensitivity and the empathy which marked her as brilliantly, brightly kind, and knew just how much Meg was hurting about all of this. She was touched by the same sense of right-or-wrong thinking as her sister, and yet Meg had been so determined to forgive Evan, so determined to welcome him home, so determined to go back to being Megan-and-Daddy, bracketed together, that she’d tried and tried until Faith had feared that her daughter’s emotional reserves would run dry.

Faith knew that more than anything, Meg wanted things to go back to how they’re been before; knew that she worried about Alys and was somewhat – not unreasonably – angry towards her old sister for the lingering resentment that Alys still felt, and the stroppiness borne of anxiety which Alys tended to show Evan. Faith could see the burning desire in Meg’s gaze as she stared at Evan with the same wide-eyed adoration she always had done; the same wide-eyed adoration with which Faith had once looked at him, with him taking on the mythical role – in Meg’s mind – as handsome prince, defender of all that was good. The truth of the matter and the reality of the world notwithstanding, he would always be her hero, and Faith worried sometimes that the conflict of that would burn Meg up; that Meg would one day come to her, entirely overwrought, having struggled for too long to reconcile Evan Howells, convicted criminal, with Evan Howells, her daddy, her knight in shining armour, and the man who had shown her unconditional love from the moment that she’d been born.

Perhaps that was the hardest thing for Faith to keep in mind. Despite her own feelings towards Evan, she had to remember that for the children, he was still their father; despite his animosity towards her, his love for them would never flicker, never lessen, never fade. He would die for them, she supposed; he might swear blind that he’d done all that he had for her, and yet she knew that wasn’t true. He’d done it for them; to secure them a future that he’d thought himself of incapable of otherwise providing, and thinking about that made her despise him slightly less, because how could she feel angry towards him for that? She’d loved him once; she’d loved him enough to bear him their three children and build a future together, and if he’d done all that he had out of selflessness then somehow that was harder to stand, because when he stood before her and told her that, how could she hate him?

How could she tell him she loathed him, when above all, humans are taught to hold tight to those among them who were selfless and thought of others; those who strove to provide; those who wanted nothing more than to support those they loved? How could she tell him she loathed him when he had merely fulfilled that awful, stereotypical role as husband and provider for the sake of their children?

Faith lay in the darkness, her heart aching, and yearned for the respite of sleep.

“Sorry,” Cerys ducked into Faith’s office, her eyebrows raised and her cheeks flushed a shade of pink that was shockingly unlike the usually-composed partner Faith knew. “There’s… erm…”

And then Cerys giggled. Giggled. Faith blinked at her in absolute bafflement, wondering what might have ruffled her so tangibly.

“There’s someone here to see you,” Cerys managed, still blushing. “A captain.”

“I don’t know any captains.”

“Well, he says he knows you.”

“Who doe-”

A tall, classically handsome man with dark hair and a ridiculous jacket strode into her office before she could finish forming her question, beaming at her with a set of teeth so white that she was almost entirely sure they were fake and adopting a power-pose in the centre of the room, which he looked around with a bright, open sense of interest that seemed surprisingly genuine, in stark contrast to the teeth and the hair and the over-the-top military reproduction coat. Cerys hovered for a moment, looking to be on the verge of giggling again, and then at a sharp look from Faith, ducked out of the room.

“Captain Jack Harkness,” he said in a bafflingly mid-Atlantic accent, and she felt a thrill of understanding suddenly. Could this be the mysterious Jack? “You know, I am loving the hair.”

“How can I help?” Faith asked flatly, leaning back in her chair and meeting his gaze with composure. She was used to men like these; men who thought that their good looks and charm were a fast-track to what they wanted, which usually tended to be sex or financial gain, and in this instance, Faith was fairly certain that this captain’s mind was most likely on engaging her legal services.

“Aw, come on,” Jack groaned. “Really? Nothing? Not a Scooby Doo?”

“I’m sorry, should…”

“Really loving the blonde,” he noted again with an approving grin. “But Rhys wasn’t kidding, we really did a number on you.”

“I…” she frowned as her hunch was confirmed. “How do you know Rhys?”

“Oh, that’s a long story.”

“How do you know me?”

“That’s a longer story.”

“What do you mean, ‘did a number on me’?”

“Well,” he blew out a long breath, then said maddeningly: “That’s a really, really long story.”

“Who the hell are you?” Faith snapped, her temper finally fraying, and she got to her feet and clenched her fists at her sides as she continued to shout: “You turn up here, you two, with your weird little snide comments and mysterious ways and you won’t tell me anything at all, and…”

“Faith?” a quiet voice asked from the doorway, and she jumped, realising too late that it was almost eleven, and looking over to find Steve stood there, looking from her to Jack with confusion and mistrust. “Who’s…”

“Sorry, Steve,” she said icily, locking eyes with Jack and putting all of her fury into her gaze, but if anything that seemed to enliven him all the more. “Captain Harkness was just leaving.”

“You have no idea how good that is to hear you say my name,” Jack sighed happily, and her scowl intensified. “Really do like the hair, by the way. You should keep it.”

“Get out.”

“I…”

“Out.”

Jack shrugged, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender before ducking out of the room with a curt nod to a still-confused Steve, who stared after him warily for several seconds until there was the sound of the door slamming shut behind him, and the tension leached from Steve’s body at once.

“Who was that?” he asked, dropping into his usual seat in front of her without further ado. “What’s an American doing in bloody Abercorran?”

Faith opened her mouth and then closed it again, before taking a deep breath and saying: “I could really do with a walk. Beach?”

Steve grinned up at her. “Beach.”

“So, they just turned up?” Steve asked, once she’d finished recounting the weirdness of Rhys and Jack and their strange comments about remembering… something. “No warning, no mention of them anywhere?”

“None at all. I mean… there might be of Jack, but I had a quick look while you paid for the parking and there was nothing I could see from the last fifteen years. That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, everyone exists at least slightly on the internet these days. To have nothing at all… that’s weird. That’s bloody suspicious.”

“That is weird,” he concurred. “What do you think they want?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think it’s to do with Evan?”

“No, they’d be a lot more aggressive if they were to do with bloody Evan,” Faith sighed. “And a lot more pushy. I don’t think they’d be complimenting me on my hair if they were to do with Evan, either.”

“The Reardons? The Glynns?”

“Not really their style, is it? I think Dewi Glynn is a bit more blood-and-knives than leather jackets and American airmen.”

“True,” Steve grinned at her with a wicked expression. “Maybe he’s gone upmarket.”

“Or maybe you’re full of shit,” Faith elbowed him in the side, laughing as she did so. “It’s just… weird. I can’t help but feel like I know them, I just…”

“Can’t place it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’ll come to you. Just… don’t think about it too hard, and it’ll come to you when you least expect it, when you’re making dinner or having a bath or something. You know how these things work; the harder you think about them, the more they slip away.”

“Is this your way of telling me to go home and drink wine and have a bath?”

“It might be, yeah,” he chuckled. “Just… try not to worry about them, Faith. They might just be cranks, and if not, then… well, I can deal with that. We can deal with that. Alright?”

“Alright,” she acquiesced, taking his hand and giving it a grateful squeeze.

Faith stood in front of the mirror that evening, staring at her reflection in the mirror. She was wearing the leather jacket again; she’d left it hidden in the boot of her car for several days, but she’d felt an odd compulsion to bring it in with her when she’d returned home earlier in the day, and now she was garbed in that and a pair of old jeans, staring at the figure in the mirror and yet barely seeing herself. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she closed her eyes as she ran her thumbs over the soft leather of the coat, willing herself to remember… remember… remember…

It was strange; she couldn’t quite explain it, but she knew that she knew Rhys, that she knew Jack, that she knew this jacket, and yet she didn’t know how or why she could swear to this with such certainty. They didn’t feature in a single one of her memories, and yet there was a deep-seated familiarity there; a sense of warmth in her heart that she couldn’t begin to quantify, and yet was no less real for that.

Opening her eyes, she caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark-haired woman in the mirror in front of her, and then she blinked hard, and staring back at her was the same weary, blonde-haired self she’d always been, and she sighed.

It would make sense eventually, she told herself, slipping off the jacket and hanging it in her wardrobe. She was sure of that.

“Alright,” a voice called, and Faith turned instinctively towards the sound. She was sat atop the cliffs, leaning back on a bench and admiring the view on a blustery Sunday morning. Evan had taken the kids out for the day, with minimal animosity passing between the two of them, but still she’d come up here to try and clear her head. She had also, for reasons she didn’t fully understand, picked up the jacket; it was wrapped around her shoulders now, keeping out the worst of the wind and absorbing the spring sunlight as she basked in the mid-morning warmth, her mind fixed on work, the children, and the divorce, yes, but also on Rhys and Jack.

The former was striding towards her, and he smiled at her as he realised she was wearing the jacket; the same grin that he’d done when he’d first seen her all those days before.

“You’re wearing the jacket!” he said as he grew closer, visibly pleased. “It looks good on you.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled, feeling abruptly self-conscious, and hating how pleased she was by the compliment. The jacket wasn’t her; it was a bit too young, a bit too edgy, a bit too-

“I’m sorry,” Rhys said, as though reading her mind, and she frowned.

“Why?”

“Well, about this.”

“About wh-”

A hood descended over her head, there was a sharp pain in her neck, and everything went dark.

Chapter Text

Faith’s head hurt.

That was her first thought as she clawed her way back to consciousness; her head hurt and her arms were bound behind her back with something that felt awfully like cable ties. She swore under her breath as she realised that Steve had been right about Rhys and Jack having dangerous intentions, and as she was preparing to raise her head and discover which of the Glynn or Reardon clan were behind this, she was surprised when a pair of brown work boots stepped into her field of vision.

“Sorry about this,” an American voice told her, and she frowned as she recognised the speaker. “All a bit cloak and dagger, but we didn’t realise what a good job we did on you.”

Faith raised her head to find Captain Jack Harkness stood before her, his expression somewhere between contrite, elated and nervous. They appeared to be in something resembling a shipping container; Rhys was hovering uncertainly by the doors, staring at her with wide, fearful eyes.

“What do you mean?” she asked, as her heartrate began to escalate and she wondered about the chances she had of snapping her bonds and rushing for the exit. She’d seen a video on how to break out of cable ties, but there was no knowing where she was; there was every chance she could blunder out of here and into the middle of nowhere, with no means of escape.

“Well, I’m going to tell you something, and it’s going to blow your mind,” Jack continued, and to her surprise he took a seat on the floor with his back against the wall opposite her, grinning at her with a conspiratorial twinkle as he made himself comfortable. That was oddly vulnerable, she reasoned; why was he treating her like a friend? And why did Rhys look quite so conflicted?

“Alright,” she managed, fighting to keep her voice level as she resolved to humour him. “Go for it.”

“So, once upon a time in Cardiff,” Jack began in a singsong tone, then continued: “I ran a team of people. Torchwood. Professionals, really, all sorts of us; doctors and scientists and analysts and even… even a coffee boy,” a sad look passed over his face, lightning-fast, before his easy, affable smile returned. “And we took on this police officer. Gwen Cooper, her name was; she was one of Cardiff’s finest, and we poached her right off the force and took her onto our team to help defend the Earth.”

“Defend the…”

“That’s what we did,” he continued cheerfully. “We fought aliens, because Cardiff… it sits on a rift in space and time. There’s a lot of nasty stuff that comes spewing out of it; stuff that wants to destroy Planet Earth and everyone on it, or just wants to cause trouble in general. So my team and Gwen Cooper and I, we worked hard to stop that from happening. And it was dangerous, and it was exhilarating, and it was… it was the best of times, until we lost first two of our friends, then another, and pretty soon it was just me and her. We achieved so much. We achieved so, so much, but the thing was… Gwen Cooper had a husband, you see. A husband and a baby girl. And it got to be that she didn’t want to save the world for a while, because… well, you know. She had more important things to be doing, and quite rightly too. So I left her and her little family. I travelled the world. I fought my own monsters – and not all of them were from outer space. And then I got a call from her husband saying that I was needed. That I had to come back.”

“Right,” Faith said carefully, unsure where the story could be going. It sounded utterly preposterous, but she was determined to play along if it meant she could escape from here all the sooner. “OK.”

“You see, some old enemies had found them. He needed my help to… well, to send his wife and daughter to somewhere safe where they wouldn’t be at risk. We had drugs that could do that – strong drugs that could change people’s memories, and some drugs that I’d developed while I was gone that made people suggestible to ideas, that could make you think all kinds of things that weren’t true. So I agreed. We came up with a plan, but we knew we couldn’t tell Gwen about it, because she’d refuse. And she’d refuse because… well, part of the plan was that her husband wasn’t going to hide; he was going to fight. And we knew… we knew that Gwen could never accept that, would never accept that, and it had to be a secret from her, what we were going to do. The day I had to do it, the day I had to drug her… it was one of the worst days of my life. Watching her eyes go blank and knowing that when she woke up she had no idea of who she was, who I was, who he was… that was…” Jack trailed off, looking down at his lap with tears in his eyes. “It almost broke my heart. But I knew I had to do it, I knew I had to keep her and her daughter safe.”

“What happened to her?” Faith asked, finding herself drawn into the story despite herself.

“We left her in a small town with some people whose memories we also modified. Gave her a fictional past, made sure that there were good people around her, you know. Kind people. Caring people. People who would take care of her, and her daughter.”

“And?”

“And, well,” Jack looked up at her and met her gaze, his eyes still wet as he smiled a sad smile. “Well, Gwen Cooper, why don’t you tell me, ‘and’? Because it turns out that you got real busy while we were gone.”

“I…” Faith let out a yelp of disbelief, shaking her head violently at the mere idea. “Are you joking? Are you actually joking? Are you insane? I’m not… I’m not Gwen Cooper, some mad woman who fights aliens! My name’s Faith Howells, I’ve got a mortgage and three children and a vindictive soon-to-be-ex-husband and a childminder and-”

“You’re Gwen Cooper,” Rhys noted, his voice tight as he spoke for the first time. “You’re my wife.”

“I think I’d remember being a bigamist.”

“Evan was only supposed to be a front,” he said tremulously. “We were only supposed to be gone for a few months, maybe a year. We never thought… we never…”

“So, what happened?” Faith demanded to know, continuing to play along, even as her mind raced. She knew her past, didn’t she? She knew where she was from; she knew who she was, and if she was vague on some of the finer details then so what? It had been two decades; she couldn’t be expected to remember everything. “What stopped you from coming back?”

“One thing after another. It wasn’t safe for us to come back for you,” Jack told her, and he sounded so utterly sincere that she couldn’t help but be tempted to believe him. “We wanted to. More than anything, we wanted to. We never thought… we never realised…”

“What?”

“I never thought you’d fall in love,” Rhys whispered, and the raw pain his voice brought a lump to her throat as he looked at her with disbelieving agony. “I never thought you’d have his children. I never thought… I never… I… I’m sorry.”

He ducked out of the container, and there was the distant sound of him sobbing. Faith and Jack sat in silence for several minutes, both of them staring at the doors and pretending they couldn’t hear Rhys weeping, before Jack spoke again.

“We can bring your memories back,” he told her. “I know all of this sounds insane, but we can… we can help you remember. We think the damage is reversible.”

“You think?”

“Well, you might remember, or you might forget the last decade or so as well and be left a vegetable.”

“Oh, great,” Faith said sarcastically. “What a wonderful offer.”

“We never said we were perfect.”

“You’re both lunatics.”

“No,” Jack told her with sad resignation. “No, I really wish we were.”

“How can I have been another person?” Faith demanded to know, unable to grasp the ridiculousness of what they were telling her; unable to comprehend the sheer scale of what they would have needed to do. “How can you have got to… to everyone, to make them think…”

“It was easier than you’d think. Abercorran’s water source is very easily accessible. It was simple enough to contaminate it with our drugs and then plant the story of who you were and where you came from; a lot of it works on the power of suggestion. People seek patterns; people want to fill in the gaps. That’s what we did with you.”

“You… Jesus Christ,” Faith gaped at him in horror. “This is… is this legal?”

“Not especially, but we don’t tend to concern ourselves with mundane things like the law. Especially not when it comes to protecting our own.”

“All those people… you’re a monster.”

“No,” Jack shook his head, but she could tell the words had landed by the way he shivered. “No, Gwen, I’m really not. And I really am sorry.”

“Why?”

He held up a syringe full of clear liquid, and Faith let out a warm, horrified scream.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, as Rhys came running. “I really am. Faith has been great, but I need my Gwen back.”

Rhys.

Her first thought upon waking was merely that; a name and a face and a scent and a voice and the very essence of the man whose entire being had been returned to her mind in glorious technicolour.

Rhys.

And then:

Alys.

Megan.  

Rhodri.  

Steve.  

And then, unwelcome but omnipresent: 

Evan.  

Gwen sat up sharply, pressing one hand to her head. The house was dark and she seemed to be alone, but there was the soft sound of conversation emanating from downstairs, and as her eyes flicked around the room, she noticed the strange blue flickering coming through the curtains, and for a moment she could only stare at it with a sense of absolute disconnect before the pieces clicked together and she understood. Getting to her feet, she raced onto the landing with numb trepidation, and there they were; two figures in high-vis vests talking calmly to Lisa on the sofa, and her best friend was crying, crying, crying, until she looked up and saw Gwen-as-Faith and seemed to snap back into a sense of propriety.

Fear crashed over her, white-hot and all-consuming, and all that had come to pass earlier that evening was unimportant now; all that she could think about was what had happened, and to whom; why Lisa was crying, and what the police wanted. Was it the children? Was it Arthur? Was it Steve? Was it…

“Faith,” Lisa said in a quivering voice, and that name sounded so strange now, so wrong, but Gwen felt the power it held calling to her all the same; it pulled her towards the stairs like gravity, drawing her down and into the lounge and into Lisa’s embrace. She wondered, for a moment, where Rhys had gone, where Jack had gone, what had happened, why her – Faith’s? she no longer knew – best friend was so distraught, and then DC Williams began to speak.

“Faith, it’s… it’s Evan. There’s been an accident.”

‘An accident’ had been a diplomatic way of wording it. There had been nothing accidental or circumstantial about Evan’s death, which had been carried out with all the meticulous ruthlessness Gwen had come to associate with gang executions. There had been a decision made by someone far higher-up than Gail Reardon; there had been a desire for punishment not only for Evan’s indiscretions but for Faith’s too, and while she supposed that their logic had been sound, they had misunderstood her on several fundamental levels.

She was no longer the person she had once been; no longer the same delicate, unblemished, idealistic woman who would have fallen apart at something like this. She had been scarred by her own dealings with the Reardons; damaged by their influence and their manipulation until she no longer recognised herself, and she no longer loved the man she had once vowed – in some version of her life and the truth, at least – to have and to hold until death do them part, which had now come to pass, she supposed, freeing her of that obligation. She would never be that woman again; even without what she now knew about herself, Faith Howells was dead and gone; Faith Howells as she had been was no more. She hadn’t loved Evan in a long time, but now she grieved for him for the sake of her children; grieved for the father they’d been deprived of, and grieved especially for Rhodri, who had no more begun to grasp at the true notion of who his father was than had had him snatched away from him again, and this time for good.

For good. Such an odd turn of phrase, she thought to herself; Evan’s death had not been for anything good, but it would be forever. The timing had, she supposed, been somewhat circumstantial, but once Jack and Rhys had come to her in the dead of night and sworn innocence, she had seen the shock on their faces and known that despite everything, despite her fear, she trusted these men, and she knew that they wouldn’t have harmed a man so inextricably bound to her children’s lives. Their sphere of influence was not one that extended over Welsh crime families, they assured her; Evan’s death might have been coincidental, but despite Rhys’s conflicting emotions about him, it had had nothing to do with them.

It was almost impossible to process; not only was the old Faith Howells dead, but Faith Howells had never existed. It was strange for Gwen, to have to make the necessary decisions and play along with the charade of the funeral and the mourning and all that came with it, because the inescapable fact of the matter was that while she was no longer Faith Howells, she had to maintain the pretence of being so, and she was also no longer Gwen Cooper – or at least, she was not Gwen Cooper again yet. She might not have loved Evan towards the end, but part of the person she’d thought she’d been had loved him, and so while she knew that Rhys was beside her, Rhys was her husband, Rhys was the man she loved, she couldn’t help but still grieve for the man who’d been by her side for a decade, corrupted and vindictive though he’d become, and she knew the struggle she faced was in triplicate; there was her own grief, there was Rhys attempting to process her grief, and there was the loss of the identity she’d utterly subsumed and lived and breathed for ten years, never doubting her own life or her own truth until it had been blown apart.

How could she tell Steve? How could she tell the children? How could she try to make them understand? How could she drag them into the world of Torchwood and danger that had apparently been her life for so long before… well, before this, before domesticity and children and relative safety? Part of her yearned for the adrenaline it had brought her; she would wake in the night from dreams of the old days, consumed with longing for her old life, but then she would be reminded of the three prone little humans along the hallway from her, and wonder how she was supposed to move on and become who she had once been, and who she needed to be again. She had two people to carry in her head now; the two women she had been, and she had no idea of how she was supposed to juggle them; no idea how to be Gwen-and-Faith, or whether to be just Faith, or just Gwen, or… or… or…

It took over almost every waking moment. There was the wonderful, dizzying ecstasy of having Rhys back in her life; the man she had forgotten she had loved, but for whom adoration and love burned so fiercely in her chest that it robbed her of breath just to look at him, and the guilt she felt was almost enough to drown her; guilt at what she’d put him through, guilt at the fact that each time he looked at her, she knew he saw the children, and Evan, and her with Evan, and that he must despise it. And yet there was the need to keep being Faith for just a little longer; to keep putting on the suits and the heels and trying to be Faith-the-solicitor and Faith-the-mum and Faith-the-grieving-sort-of-ex-wife, and the daily struggle was exhausting.

It wasn’t until she made a brief lunchtime trip into Boots, and then spent an evening with Jack in the kitchen of the house, both of them swearing and giggling under their breaths as they knocked back wine and dripped hair colourant onto the tiles, that she began to feel more in control of things.

After getting out of the shower, and as Jack poured her another glass of wine, Gwen looked in the mirror and the dark-haired woman staring back at her looked, for the first time in a long time, like herself.

“You’re mad,” Alys said dismissively, getting to her feet and walking over to the edge of the patio to stare out over the water with a dismissive toss of her hair. “You’re absolutely mad. I’m going to get Gran and Grandad to have you sectioned, you’ve gone bonkers.”

“Alys, don’t,” Meg told her chidingly, looking over at her mother for guidance, and Gwen could see the uncertainty in her face; she held out her arms to her middle child, who clambered into them with a grateful sigh, burying her face in her neck and asking in a small voice: “Mum, are you alright?”

“I’m fine, love,” Gwen told her brightly, looking from Meg to Alys to Rhys and back again, pressing a kiss to Meg’s forehead before continuing: “I know it all sounds like a lot but… it’s true.”

“How can you not actually be Mum?” Meg mumbled, clinging to her as though afraid to let go. “You’re my mum, that’s…”

“I am your mum,” Faith reassured her, holding her all the more tightly, and hating what she needed to say next. “And Daddy was really your dad, but with Alys…”

“Anwen,” Alys cut in mockingly, her tone full of derision at the unfamiliar name. “How can I be Anwen? I’m not. I can’t be… you can’t be… he’s not… how can he-” she gestured dismissively at Rhys. “-be my dad? It’s bollocks.”

“Alys!”

“It’s all bollocks,” Alys all but shouted, then stormed into the house before either of them could say another word, slamming the back door behind her so hard that the glass cracked, and Gwen and Rhys exchanged a weary, worried look.

Gwen had asked for the right to do this; to be the one to tell Steve, and Rhys had capitulated almost at once to her request, although she knew how much it must have cost him to do so. They’d talked about Steve; talked about how she felt about him, and while it was confusing and overwhelming for her to try and make sense of, she knew where her heart truly lay; it was not Gwen who had loved Steve, it was Faith, but while Faith might be gone, an echo of her feelings remained. Gwen felt a lingering sense of fondness towards him; he had been a stable, a constant, when she’d needed him, but now she needed to tell him the truth about who she was, and let him down as gently as possible.

They sat on the same bench that Rhys and Jack had abducted her from; she half-worried that they might appear from nowhere as she brought him up to speed, but the two of them remained unaccosted as she told him her story; explained Rhys and Jack and a little of the life she’d left behind, leaving out as many of the wilder details as she could for her own and his safety. Steve remained silent for most of her explanation, staring out over the sea, and somehow that made it harder; she could see only half of his face, and that half was almost impossible to read as he twisted his hands together in his lap, refusing to betray a single emotion about what he was being told.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen finished at last, guilt weighing heavily in the pit of her stomach. “I am. I truly am.”

“For what?” he asked, still refusing to look at her, and that stung her. “You never existed. I mean… you exist, but you… the version of you I knew… you never existed. I fell in love with a ghost.”

“I never set out with the intention to hurt you,” she assured him, her voice breaking as she understood the depths of the agony he must be feeling, and she loathed herself for doing this to him; loathed herself for breaking his heart. “I never set out to deceive you; I never thought…”

“You never could have foreseen that you’d had your memories wiped and that you were placed here to keep you safe from a threat you won’t tell me about,” he noted, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. “Yeah, no, that one doesn’t come up very often. I’ve been dumped for less weird reasons.”

“Steve…”

He looked over at her at last, and his eyes were full of quiet, enduring pain as he leant over and kissed her softly on the cheek.

“Goodbye, Faith,” he whispered, then got to his feet and walked away.

“We need to talk about the kids,” Rhys said one morning. They were having breakfast in his hotel room, safely tucked away from the prying eyes of the residents of Abercorran; the two of them were sat in the window, looking out over the hills through a grey drizzle as they made their way through two enormous plates of cooked breakfast and large mugs of strong tea. “I know you don’t want to, but…”

“Rhys, I can’t have this conversation with you,” Gwen told him wearily, dropping her knife and fork with a clatter and propping her head on her hands as she looked down at the remains of her food. “I really, really can’t. I know it’s hard for you; I know you never thought Evan and I would…”

“Make two babies.”

She winced, then forced herself to look up at him. “Yeah, but… they’re part of my life. They’re my children, Rhys, they’re part of me. I know how much it hurts you to look at them; I’ve bloody seen it. And I’m sorry about it, Rhys. I’m sorry for what I did when I was Faith; I’m sorry for loving Evan, and I’m sorry for taking him into my bed, and I’m sorry for having Meg and Rhodri. But all I knew was that I was doing what everyone expected me to do, and what was right, and what I wanted. I fit in. I played the part. And yes, Meg and Rhodri were part of that, but they’re not… they’re not props that I can just throw away. I know, alright? I know that every time you look at them you see Evan, and I do too. Even before I knew who I was, it hurt me to look at them and see the man I came to despise, the man who’d hurt me and hurt them time and time again with his actions. But I learnt not to see him. I learnt to find the pieces of me in them; I learnt not to hold it against them when they behaved in ways I knew were learnt from him. I learnt not to tell them that they were like their father as though it were some sort of insult. I tried to see all the parts of me, instead. Can you do that? Please, Rhys; please can you do that for me?”

“Gwen,” Rhys said flatly, raising his eyebrows. “You daft cow, I’m not going to tell you to give them up, they’re not bloody… naughty puppies that we can take to a rescue centre.”

“Oh,” she let out a long, tremulous breath, and reached for her mug of tea with a shaking hand, taking a long, steadying sip and then setting it back down. “Oh. I…”

“Yes, it’s hard,” he admitted. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’s not. But they need you, and you need them.”

“What do you…”

“I’d tell you if you stopped interrupting,” he rolled his eyes at her good-naturedly. “They need help. Even without all of this – without who you really are – they’re bloody traumatised. Anw- Alys is struggling, even I can tell that, and Meg? She’s so anxious she can hardly function properly; I think she’s scared that they’re going to take you away from her next, and even Rhodri’s probably worried, poor little man, picking up on everyone else’s moods all the time.”

Gwen said nothing; she looked down at her plate and kept her gaze fixed there, knowing that Rhys was right and hating herself, in that instant, for how much she’d put her children through.

“And then there’s you,” Rhys said gently, reaching over and taking her hand. “You were traumatised enough from Torchwood without all of this as well. We need to get you all some help. We need to work hard at being a family. And we need to make sure that you’re operating at your best, because our kids need you to be one hundred percent for them, so that they can be at their best too.”

“Our…” Gwen’s voice cracked as she looked up at her husband, who squeezed her hand reassuringly.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Our kids. If they’ll have me, that is.”

“I know that this is different,” Rhys said quietly, looking across Roald Dahl Plass to where his wife was ordering five ice creams from a vendor who he remembered from what he fondly recalled as ‘the good old days’. He thought fleetingly about offering to go over and help her carry them back, before concluding that doing so wasn’t worth the earful he’d be bound to elicit in return, and that it would be far more entertaining to watch her struggle – albeit rather uncharitable. “I know it’s all a bit weird.”

“Tell me about it,” Alys muttered, scuffing the toes of her Doc Martens over the concrete as she stood a short distance away, taking photos of the Pierhead Building with her new camera. “Thanks for the identity crisis, Rhys.”

“One day, I’ll get you to call me ‘Dad’,” he noted boldly, then quaked slightly under the force of the distinctly Gwen-ish look she turned on him. “When you’re ready to. If you’d like to. Anwen.”

“Alys.”

“I’ll get used to that eventually,” he sighed, then teased: “Even if you do look a bit different now. Taller. Moodier. More hair… more eyeliner…”

Meg giggled and leaned into his side, looking out over the water. “Are there really aliens in the Bay?”

“Oh yes,” Rhys told her seriously, settling an arm around her shoulders. “Big ones. Bright pink ones. Ones that eat little girls for breakfast.”

“He’s joking,” Alys said quickly, as Meg squealed with delighted horror and Rhodri squirmed on Rhys’s lap, trying to escape from his grasp so that he could go and investigate this strange new place. “Right?”

“Well…” Rhys teased, then caught the younger girl’s momentary look of horrified incredulity. “Yes, I’m joking. Your mother killed them back in 2007.”

“Ha, ha,” Alys deadpanned.

“What time is Uncle Jack getting here?” Meg asked quietly, as Alys wandered over to look at the gleaming silver sculpture in the middle of the space.

“Not long now,” Rhys assured her, as Gwen began to make her way back over to them, balancing two tubs of ice cream atop her bump with one hand and juggling two brightly-packaged ice lollies and another tub in the other. “And he’s looking forward to showing you both around.”

“Right,” Gwen called with a grin. “Who wants ice cream?”

Alys bounded back over and retrieved her tub of mint chocolate chip with a muttered thanks before returning to her examination of the sculpture as Rhys took his own tub and set it beside him, unwrapped Rhodri’s Mini Milk, and nodded approvingly as Meg accepted her own lolly with a quiet ‘thank you’ to her mother. After a moment, the little girl seized Rhodri by the hand and dragged him over to join their older sister, leaving Rhys and Gwen alone and momentarily free from the responsibility of supervising three children and their ice creams. Letting out a long breath, Gwen sank down beside her husband and leant gratefully against his shoulder, spooning her own ice cream thoughtfully into her mouth as she looked from the children to the sculpture and then back to Rhys.

“Looks weird,” she said after a moment, as Rhys set about demolishing his scoops of salted caramel with gusto. “Seeing…”

“Seeing our children muck about where you used to work,” he finished for her. “Yeah, it does.”

“That still sounds so nice,” she murmured, Rhys pressing a kiss to her temple. “Really, really nice…”

“Well, Ms Cooper-slash-Howells-slash-Whoever-You-Are-This-Week, don’t go getting all mushy on me,” Jack’s voice said from behind them. “Now, two things. One, why are your children sniffing around the emergency exit, and two, where the hell is my ice cream?”