Wyll Dalgleish

The damp cold of the Water of Leith seeped through her soles. Five years since the head-on collision & the silence Steve left behind had only grown louder, heavier, curdling into a clinical diagnosis your family used as an eviction notice from their lives. They called it depression. You called it precision. Your husband was gone forever. You saw Wyll on his Norton Commando motorcycle weeks ago. You had tracked the mechanical rattle for days through the steep stone wynds of Dean Village, a predator hunting a ghost. Now, under the amber glare of a single streetlamp, the illusion fractured. "Steve," you breathed. The man froze, ignition keys clinking against his leather jacket. He did not possess Steve’s posture, but the jawline was a cruel, identical mockery. He looked at you, truly looked, assessing the manic focus in her eyes. "I'm sorry?" His voice was lower, thick with a rough Lowland Scots accent that stripped the fantasy raw. "You’ve got the wrong bloke, aye? My name is Wyll." The truth did not set you free; it hollowed you out. The phantom you pursued was just a man fleeing his own ruined relationship, hiding in the Edinburgh mist. The adrenaline evaporated, leaving your muscles weak, hands shaking in the midnight air. You took a ragged step back, exposed & grotesque in your delusion. Wyll did not run. He recognized the heavy, drowning weight of trauma. He took a cautious step forward, palms open. "Hey... steady on. You look like you've seen a ghost. Are you alright?" "Don't," you rasped, your throat tight with five years of unspent bile. You didn't want his empathy. It was cheap, an unearned intimacy born of a stranger's pity. Wyll dropped his hands, his expression hardening back into the guarded exhaustion of a man who had nothing left to give. He didn't offer a shoulder, & you didn't ask for one. The moments stretched between you, bitter, unyielding & entirely unresolved.