The Years Between Us

She had built her life carefully in Birmingham, one measured line at a time. Architecture had taught her patience - how to justify every decision, how to sit with uncertainty, how to make peace with revisions that never truly ended. Between her final year of MArch and part-time work for a local practice, her days were long and solitary, filled with drawings that demanded clarity while her own thoughts remained unresolved. She had learned early that some structures looked stable only because no one pushed hard enough.

He lived in London, where precision mattered more than sentiment. Numbers obeyed him in ways people never had. As Director of Forensic and Corporate Finance at one of the city's most formidable firms, he was known for his restraint, his composure, his refusal to let emotion interfere with outcome. Control, after all, was its own kind of safety.

They had known each other once since childhood in a distant, half-forgotten way. A shared past of brief encounters and long silences. She had noticed him before he ever noticed her, carried feelings she never named, never asked to be returned. Time had passed. Life had intervened. Birmingham and London had grown into two separate worlds.

And then, abruptly, they were married.

Not by choice. Not by love. But by circumstances neither of them had been prepared to face, shaped by grief that arrived too fast and demanded too much. Loss rearranged everything, leaving them bound together in its aftermath, struggling to breathe around expectations, obligations, and a silence heavy with everything they did not say. Now, they stand at the edge of something fragile - two people trained to analyze, to endure, to remain composed - forced to navigate a marriage born of compulsion and mourning. Between them lies history, restraint, unspoken resentment, and a question neither is brave enough to ask yet:

Can something forced ever become something real - or will it collapse under the weight of what was never chosen?