Chapter Text
London, July 1936
“Are you sure about it?” I asked, not quite managing to keep the disbelief from my voice.
“Absolutely, Sir. The boy looks very much like you did—at that age,” said Robins.
Robins had been with our family for years, managing factories and smoothing over the rough patches. He knew our business. He knew our name. And, more dangerously, he knew the parts of my history that weren’t meant to be spoken aloud. The parts with her.
”That woman.” Still, after all this time, the phrase burned. “His mother?” I asked, pretending at indifference. “Is she letting him work there?” She must be truly desperate then.
“He lives in an orphanage, Sir.”
“Orphanage?!“ The word lodged in my throat.
”Yes, Sir”
I turned to the window. “I want to see him. Tomorrow. Arrange it.”
Robins nodded. He was already halfway to the door when I added, more quietly, “I don’t want to meet him. Just... see him.”
And then I was alone. Alone with the weight of the name I refused to speak.
An Orphanage. Interesting and odd given the situation. It didn’t fit. Whatever else she had been, she had wanted that child. He remembered how she used to sit with both hands on her belly, whispering to it like it was made of gold. She called him perfect. Said they were going to be a family. At the time, he’d thought he crazy.
He still did.
Tom swallowed against the taste rising in his mouth. Even now, ten years later, just the thought of her made him feel sick. But the boy. He meant she hadn’t lied. She’d begged him to stay. And he hadn’t listened.
And yet, she never came after him. Never wrote. Never asked for money or help. She just vanished.
That wasn’t like her.
It wasn’t like her at all.
(-)
I hate visiting factories, thought Tom with the hands in his pockets, staring up at the soot-blackened bricks and clouded windows, and felt that familiar coil of unease tighten in his chest. They always made him feel this way—small, despite their grime. Judged, despite their silence.
This one was a cotton mill. Modest, by northern standards. The real giants were farther up—in Lancashire, where the heart of England's textile industry still thumped beneath towers of smoke and steel.
He had never visited this site before. In truth, he avoided factory visits whenever possible. They unsettled him in ways he could never quite articulate: the noise, the cold, the smell of metal and labor stitched into every beam. Even now, the place seemed to breathe around him—an organism built on heat and hunger.
Still, it was ours.
The Riddles had not always been industrialists. They were once just landowners with a title and a manor tucked away in the North. That changed in the late 1700s when one Thomas Riddle decided owning land was no longer enough. He chose ambition over stillness. Cotton over nobility. And from there, the empire was born.
Cotton gave way to weapons. Weapons to engines. Engines to flight.
By the time Tom was born, the family name had long since stopped meaning lineage—it meant output. Power. Profit.
He remembered walking the long, echoing halls of the manor as a child, staring up at the portraits of grim-eyed men in waistcoats and wigs. He used to imagine their voices whispering through: Make us proud.
He had wanted that once. To be one of them. To build something worthy of their gaze.
But that was before her.
Before everything collapsed into ten months he could neither explain nor erase.
He still divided his life that way. Before her. After her.
Because after those bloody months, nothing was ever the same again.
Ten months gone. Ten months of shame, silence, scandal. Time he had buried under work, marriage, and the steady, practiced art of forgetting. But memory was a trickster. The good ones faded. The bad ones are hard to drive away. Daylight flashes, or midnight terrors from which he woke gasping, heart galloping in the dark.
He looked up at the mill again.
The building stood there, blunt and unapologetic, as if waiting for him to flinch. He could feel the pressure settle on his shoulders—the weight of inheritance, of expectation, of legacy.
What would he add to it all? How would he be remembered?
The one who brought shame to our name, whispered the voice in his head. It sounded suspiciously like his father.
Tom exhaled slowly. Straightened his shoulders.
And walked inside.
(-)
The rumble of the machinery below made him uneasy. Even here, behind the thick wooden door of the director’s office, the sound seeped through—relentless, inescapable. A low, mechanical thunder.
The director was still talking with Robins, something about projections or labour output—Tom had stopped listening the moment they entered. He had offered the expected greetings, endured a few minutes of pleasantries, then let the conversation fade into the background. He didn’t care enough to even feign interest.
He sat now in a high-backed chair, whisky in hand, its warmth doing little to settle the churn in his chest.
His thoughts kept drifting downward.
He had seen the boy. Just minutes ago. crawling out from beneath one of the machines, face smudged with oil, swallowed by the din of metal and labor. A child, but unmistakably familiar.
Even the director—who had met Tom no more than twice—had spotted it. The resemblance. Clear enough to be pointed out like a fact, a discovery.
How bittersweet that was.
A small, quiet part of him felt something like relief. That the boy looked like him. That he wasn’t all hers.
But the rest of him—a darker, sharper instinct—hoped it wasn’t true. That the child bore no resemblance to him. That he might be her child, entirely. In look. In spirit.
Because then it would be easier to walk away. Easier to feel nothing. To hate him, even.
But what if he is like me?
That thought had crawled into his bed the night before and refused to leave. It had kept him from sleep. And when exhaustion finally took him, it came with her.
Pale, ash-grey skin. Hollow eyes. Limbs too long, reaching for him through a dream.
She caught him this time—held him. Pulled him close. He woke up in a cold sweat once again.
It had been like that for months after he he returned home. Nightmares that wouldn’t let go. Sleep he feared more than the waking world. There were nights he’d paced until dawn, thinking he’d shatter if he let his eyes close. Maybe he already had.
As time passed, his nightmares became less and less frequent. But he has never really got rid of them. Like he has never really got rid of her. He has never got free, not really.
Now, sitting in this office, Tom felt something he hadn’t expected: certainty.
Coming here had been the right choice.
He had run long enough—from her, from the shame. From the questions he never dared ask, and the answers he feared he already knew.
For ten years, he had buried that part of his life beneath silence and routine, hoping it would stay dead.
It hadn't.
He was tired of pretending it never happened. Tired of letting shadows rule him. Of being a man who flinched from memory.
He wasn’t here to make peace.
He was here to stop hiding.
To face what he abandoned.
To look the past in the eyes.