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It wasn't like Halit didn't try to love Sonya. He could honestly say that he had tried his best. Especially after they found out about the baby. Sonya was a beautiful woman; kind, caring, sweet and - just like he did - she desperately wanted to make things work.
But there was just one thing that made their endeavors futile, and it went by the name of "Peride".

Whenever he lay in bed next to Sonya, his eyes closed, he inadvertently imagined it was Peride next to him. Whenever he kissed Sonya, his head conjured up the sensations he'd felt when kissing Peride. (Those fleeting, by-gone seconds of bliss.) The feel of her body in his arms, the smell of her hair, the soft resistance of her lips. And Halit was gripped by a yearning so strong, he sometimes felt powerless to contain it. He couldn't sit still then, he had to move, do something, anything, lest the yearning somehow burst out of him.

He couldn't be idle. He always had to be out and about in Istanbul, the Garden Bar, anywhere. Sonya begged him to spend more time with him, but her gentleness, her absolute devotion, made the whole situation even more unbearable for Halit.

Whenever he strolled around Istanbul at night, sometimes a flask containing whiskey stored in his pocket which he covertly took big swallows of, he pondered that moving on from Peride might have been easier if only he'd had more time with her.

The short time they'd spent together left him wondering about so many things. Wondering what it would have felt like to wake up next to her. What it felt like to be inside of her. What it felt like to stare into her green eyes for hours. Wondering about all the things that could have been. Halit was sure, if he had gotten to experience all those things with her, he wouldn't be forced to agonize and obsess over them now, because he would have had the memories to tide him over. If only he had had more time with her, to fall back on now, he wouldn't be this shell of himself.

It had seemed so easy for her to leave him behind and so he wondered too, if she ever even thought of him at all.

Over the months, he felt her presence fading from his memories, becoming unsure of what her eyes had really looked like, of the way her lashes had framed them, or of the exact shape of her lips, and of the shade of her copper hair.
And if he thought that his fading memory of her image would do anything to assuage the yearning - well, he was most definitely wrong.

He became even more despondent, restless, and sometimes didn't come home to Sonya for days on end. The impending birth of his child barely even crossed his mind. If he did think of his future child, in his head the baby somehow had Peride's red hair and her mischievous smile. His mind conjured up images of Peride with a baby - their baby - in her arms, smiling up at him in that unguarded manner she had. Of him coming home and finding her asleep with their child on her lap.

But the ghostly Peride that lived in his thoughts never spoke to him. She was a mute phantom that was never close to the real thing. His Peride had been so outspoken (unusually so, for the women of his time), effervescent, overflowing with passion and mesmerizing in her liveliness.

He grew angry at her sometimes, for leaving him behind with such seeming ease, as though he was just a passing figure in her life. He wondered if she had taken other lovers and the thought tortured him. But then he recalled the way she had looked at him, as though - as though she really saw him for who he was. The way her eyes had pierced him that time she told him she wasn't in love with him, their expression belying her words.

He recalled the way she had sounded when she told him she would forget him, like she wanted to convince herself even more than him.

When Ahmet was born and Halit held him for the first time, Sonya beaming at him prettily, well put together despite the laborious birth, he felt a little like himself again. He felt like he could at least teach what he knew to this child, so tiny, so precious and pure and perfect. He felt a little more content than he had before, but it also made him wonder if Peride would get to experience this feeling too, with another man - and with another man's child gathered in her arms. And he resented her a little for having robbed both of them of getting to be a family together.

He remembered how she had pushed him to Sonya; the prospect of seeing him with another woman must not have daunted her the way the thought of her with another man daunted - tortured - him.
Sonya loved him and he loved Peride and Peride was gone, gone, gone. He saw Sonya wasting away, devoting herself to their child, begging him to come back to her, let them be a family; but he never did come back to her - had never really been hers - and he despised himself for it.
He tried to be a good father to Ahmet, to be there for him, but felt like he wasn't doing a very good job.

He took other women sometimes, some of Madame Eleni's girls, or pretty dancers from the bar. Sometimes they had red hair, like Peride. Sometimes they had green eyes.
Sometimes they were spunky and passionate. But not one of them truly was like her.

Halit thought that it was cruel of Allah, to lead him to a woman who was perfect for him, made for him, just to take her away again. That he didn't even get to know her name. Would never know what her name felt like on his tongue, how his lips would feel like shaping the letters. Would never know how his voice would have sounded when he said it out loud. He tried finding names he thought might fit her - but somehow they never quite seemed to catch her essence.

How cruel of Allah to give him this woman who completed him, to give him a sense of fulfillment, and then to take her away again, as though she had never been real, so Halit now sensed the loss of what could have been all the more acutely.

He used to think making it, being successful, was the ultimate goal for him, but he had long since realized that Peride had been the point of it all. Acquiring the Garden Bar, taking her there, dancing with her there…

Somehow everything in his life came back to his Peride. There were reminders of her everywhere: in the way the darkness sounded whenever he ghosted through the sleeping Istanbul at night where he sometimes thought he caught a whiff of her scent; in the way the sea waves cresting on the shore conjured up echoes of her laughter.
The Pera Palace was so intricately linked to her, like an embodiment of her and their time spent together, that some days he couldn't even bear to go near it.

Throughout the years she would show up in his dreams, laugh at him, talk to him, tell him her name - but when he woke up, he could never remember what it had been.

Sometimes he didn't sleep at all for days and those were the worst. He found himself staring at the ceiling, the walls, into nothing, chain-smoking, and sometimes he started talking to himself, imagining her there. He knew he had to seem deluded and unstable to those around him. Sonya always fussed about him whenever he went to visit her and their child.

He wondered what Allah's plan was for him, what all of this meant. He marvelled at how eventually everything always came down to "Peride".

*

Esra knew it was foolish to hope that Halit would somehow, miraculously, show up in present-day Istanbul, but she still looked for his face in everyone she came across. Looked for his gait and his shape in every crowd that she passed by. Somehow, she had become so much more aware of her surroundings since coming back from the past, and it was because she always longed to see his face, so she never stopped looking for it.

Somehow her life had been divided into a Before and an After. Meeting Halit, being Peride, travelling through time had been a seismic shift in her life. One that had left everyone else unaffected, but her foundations had been deeply shaken that she was still building them back up even now, weeks, months, after she had returned.

Before, she had been quick to fall. Quick to develop crushes, to be infatuated, never averse to harmless flirting and good-natured teasing.
After, she was disinterested in dating, in sex, in meeting someone new and getting to know their intricacies.
Well, not completely disinterested in sex. Only disinterested in sex with men who weren't Halit. And since that precluded everyone in her time - it was a moot point.

Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, convinced he was lying next to her. Sometimes, groggily, still half asleep, she reached out across the bed expecting him to be there.

That was another thing that had changed. Before, she had never had problems with falling asleep, once her eyes had closed she had been dead to the world.
Now - well, now, she often woke up restlessly, awoken from hazy dreams of him. Of Halit talking to her, holding her, kissing her. Of looking at her with his intense gaze.
She would fall back asleep, only to be woken up again seconds or minutes or hours later.

Halit featured so much in her dreams that it became uncanny. How cruel of her subconscious to subject her to the acute feeling of loss she experienced every time she woke up and realized that he was gone, hadn’t even been there in the first place.
She was an independent woman, goddammit, Esra scolded herself, she shouldn't be this hung-up on a man.

The knowledge that he was long dead in her present time, his body decayed, gone and forgotten as though he had never existed, hardly helped matters. Instead, the thought of strong, lively Halit dead made her heart ache.
Being a journalist, the urge to research him was strong, to comb through archives in search of any mention of him or the Garden Bar. Or to ask Ahmet about his father, for little details about him. If maybe Ahmet had met Halit later on, during his travels in his youth.
But so far she hadn't.

Before-Esra would have done it, without hesitation or second thoughts.
After-Esra was a little more disillusioned, more cautious, and more circumspect.
After-Esra was a little too much in love with a de facto dead man to go to any library or archive and find any mention of his death.
Finding an obituary with his name would just make it all too real, too final, too unavoidable. It would be like leaving him behind in the past all over again.

In her head, she had spun a pretty little story about Halit finding out about the time-travelling keys, of him travelling through decades of Turkish history looking for her.
In her head, she just had to keep looking for his handsome physique and his dark eyes (that had looked at her like she was the most precious thing they ever beheld).
She was a dreamer and though disillusioned, she didn't know if she would ever really lose that sliver of hope she held onto.

That maybe, only maybe, during one of those times she woke up at night, he really would be there. That he would pull her body to his, kiss her neck, and tell her everything was alright.

The hope that she would one day get to spend midnight in his arms.