Love that was once lost

It’s 1941, and Paris holds its breath.

The stranglehold and suffocation of occupation have muted the once-lively streets. A quiet despair lingers among those who have learned to live in fear. We all carry secrets, placed beneath coats, behind shuttered windows, in the passing glances we dare to exchange. Every step is a risk. Every word is a potential betrayal.

I drag myself through the cold. The wet pavement muffles my footsteps. The scent of stale smoke and bread, long since lost its warmth, greets me as I approach the café. Once, this place was alive with laughter and music, with poets who spun words over cups of thick espresso. It is a far cry from the emptiness it holds now.

I pause before entering. A siren wails in the distance as my fingers brush the edges of the book hidden underneath my coat. A precarious lifeline wrapped in a leather cover.

Inside, the light is always dim. The air, however, is thick, like the silence that comes before a double-cross. There are few people left who come here now. Most are tired souls and those who have nowhere else to go. They hunch over tables, clutching whatever remnants of normalcy they can.

I should fade into the background, just like them. But not today. Not when fate feels so close.

My eyes catch on the man in the back corner. He is still at first, his face angled downward, his fingers curled around an untouched glass. There is something about him. A quiet alertness. A posture honed by necessity. His hands rest too carefully on the table as if he has spent years teaching them not to tremble.

And then he looks up.

There is nothing gentle in his eyes. Only sharpness, wariness, a knowing that I cannot place.

I don’t know why I approach him. Why I don’t just walk away like I always did with everyone else. Maybe it’s his eyes. They settle just long enough to unearth something in me I thought I had buried.

I sit across from him. “You’re not who you say you are,” I murmur, my voice low. It is not a question. It is a simple fact.

He holds my gaze. Surprise or something else, I can’t tell. But then, just as quickly, it vanishes.

“I’m exactly who I say I am,” he replies.

I study him. The trace of stubble along his jaw. The way his fingers twitch, betraying him for the briefest moment. He is not a journalist. Not really. He is a soldier, like me. And we are both playing a game that could cost us our lives.

I slide the book across the table.

“For you.”

His hand hovers above it. Hesitation laced in the small space between his fingertips and the worn leather cover. When he finally takes it, his skin brushes mine. At that moment, something shifts between us.

#

A week. That is all it takes for everything to fall apart.

I don’t know how we ended up on the street, running through the alleys of Paris, his hand tight around my wrist. The world outside the café has turned into something we all dreaded. The shouts. The shattering glass. Screams that will haunt the walls long after this night is over.

The safe house is gone. Our enemies are too close.

Leo, if that is even his name, moves like a man who has run before. He pulls me faster, dragging me through the narrow paths, his breath desperate against the backdrop of gunfire somewhere farther down the street. There is no time to think. No time to wonder if I will see tomorrow.

We reach a courtyard where the sounds of the city are muffled by old stone walls around us. We lean against each other, our bodies heaving, our hands still locked together.

He studies me now, as if trying to memorize the lines of my face.

“I don’t know your name.”

“Juliette,” I whisper. It is the only thing I can give him. A piece of me that will not change.

We stand there, just staring at each other and everything else we cannot say. There is no fear in his face. Not even a slight pause.

I should say something. I should tell him to leave, to go before it’s too late. But I don’t. I can’t. There is no future waiting beyond this night. No promise that we will see the morning.

Instead, I press my lips to his.

It lasts only a breath. In that breath, I feel all the things I have been holding up until now fade. His lips are still warm, still soft, though I know we will not have another chance. This moment will be all we ever have.

#

It’s the winter of 1941.

The cold is merciless, but it is not the cold that keeps me awake at night. It is the ache of waiting. Each day, I watch soldiers patrol the streets. Each night, I listen for their boots. Each passing moment, I wonder if Leo will ever return.

In the months that pass, he becomes a part of my thoughts. I don’t see him often. We have shared glances in the streets, exchanged letters, and spent a few minutes together in dark alleys.

Our love begins to grow deeper through every word. It is a secret we both keep. Both a comfort and a burden. It feels like a thin line stretched too tight, ready to snap.

One night, he finds me in our usual spot. A barely lit corner near the Seine. He looks more tired than usual.

“I’m being sent out of Paris,” he says. “I leave tomorrow.”

I don’t ask why. I already know. He is part of something larger than both of us. I can see it in his eyes. The knowledge that we may never see each other again.

He takes my hands in his. “Juliette, I need you to promise me something.”

I swallow hard. “What?”

“Meet me in two weeks,” he says. “At the bookshop on Rue Lepic in Montmartre. You’ll know which one. It’s the one with the faded red door.” His gaze locks with mine. “Promise me.”

I nod. Two weeks. It’s not long enough, but it is all we have.

“You’ll be safe?” The question just slips out of my mouth.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he pulls me close, pressing a kiss to my forehead as if trying to leave his mark on me. As if trying to make me remember him forever.

“We’ll meet again.” His voice cracks just slightly. I wish I could believe him. But the war has taken so many things from me. I hope it does not take him too.

#

The days stretch without end, and I keep telling myself I will be fine. There are Resistance missions to run, secrets to pass, and letters to deliver. But every task feels like nothing more than a distraction from what I truly want.

I want Leo. I want to be with him, to keep him safe. But I know that is not possible.

The night of our meeting finally arrives. The chatter and clatter of the streets are unusually quiet. A strange stillness lingers, pressing against my skin like a warning. I feel something is wrong, but I go anyway, clutching the worn envelope in my pocket. A letter meant for someone else, now nothing more than a memento of the promise I made.

Then I hear it, a distant rumble.

My feet stop. My breath catches. I lift my eyes to the bookshop just ahead. The faded red door.

For a moment, Montmartre listens.

And then—

The ground shakes. A violent explosion tears through the building, sending dust and debris into the air. The force knocks me backward. I hit the ground hard, the world spinning around me.

I don’t know if I can run. But my legs move on their own, carrying me forward through the crumbling streets, past shattered windows and burning wreckage.

By the time I reach the bookshop, it is gone. Nothing remains but ruins. The storefront has collapsed, leaving behind only broken stone and twisted metal.

Leo is nowhere.

#

Paris, once alive with the fire of resistance, is now suffocated by the tragic toll of war. The city has lost its breath. And so have I.

I can no longer wait for Leo. I can no longer search the ruins for his face, hoping to find him among the ashes of a world that refuses to remember. The hope I once clung to has been swallowed by grief.

I tell myself, over and over, that he is gone. That the bomb took him. That the rumors of spies executed under the occupier’s regime were true. I do not want to believe it. But it is easier this way.

Grieving him is easier than hoping.

I throw myself into the fight. There is no room left for tenderness, no space for longing. Only survival. Only resistance. The people around me become shadows, just faces I barely know. But we are bound by a common enemy, and that is enough.

Each mission feels more reckless than the last. I no longer fear death. I take greater risks. I ignore orders. I volunteer for the most dangerous tasks, the ones where survival is nothing more than a distant possibility. But death does not come for me.

Instead, I march forward through the wreckage of the city I once called home, a place that no longer remembers what it was before the war.

I let it consume me. I let it take the pieces of me that once belonged to Leo. The last remnants of him drift away like the memory of our first kiss.

As hope fades, the days turn into weeks, then months, then years. The war rages on. The Resistance is no longer a whisper in the dark but a desperate fight for survival.

I never hear Leo’s name. I never find him in the survivor lists that circulate through the devastated cities. And yet, I keep searching, even when I know the truth.

Then the moment we Parisians have all been waiting for arrives.

Paris is liberated.

The streets flood with life once more. The occupation has ended, but for me, nothing has truly changed. The city feels colder now, somehow emptier, as though the light that once burned inside me has been stolen.

I return to the places Leo and I wandered together. The alleyway where we first kissed, the café where we dreamed of a life beyond war. But all that remains are echoes, memories that do not belong to this new world.

I know the war is over. But for me, it never truly ended.

Faces have changed. Laughter fills the air again, but it feels foreign, like it belongs to someone untouched by loss.

And yet, in every crowded room, in every shifting crowd, I look for him.

I hear his voice in the back of my mind, whispering, “We’ll meet again.”

But the years have taken those words from me. I no longer believe in promises made in war.

I no longer believe in anything except the pain of his absence.

#

Seven years have passed since the war ended. Seven years since I last kissed Leo. Seven years since I buried the memory of the man I once believed would be my forever. But war does not ask permission before it reshapes a life.

Paris, once luminous, has become a city of ghosts, a place where the past haunts in every street and shadow.

So I leave.

I board a ship to London, my heart walled off, my hands clutching only what is necessary. I tell myself this is not an escape, only a change. And yet, when the city disappears into the horizon, I do not look back.

In London, I try to stitch together a life from the remnants of what I once was. I teach French at a small school, filling my days with lessons and my evenings with paint. Still lifes, landscapes, brushstrokes carrying the words I can no longer bring myself to speak.

I tell myself I have moved on, that I have survived, that I am whole.

But love does not come again. Not true love. Not the kind that lives in your bones and reshapes you. I am not the woman I once was. Leo is nothing more than a dream that fades further with each passing year. My heart is empty, and I no longer know how to fill it.

Several years later, on an afternoon in a small London bookshop, my past finds me.

A worn volume of French poetry. I open it idly, turning the pages, and there, in the margins, is an inscription written in a hand I once knew as well as my own.

For J. In another life, I would have had forever.

The air leaves my lungs.

I run my fingers over the ink, as if touch alone could make him appear before me. It is impossible. He was lost, taken. And yet, the book is here, his words preserved in a note I was never meant to find.

Days pass, and the book offers no answers, only questions. Then, between its pages, I find an address, a street in Paris, a place I know.

Could this be Leo’s way of leading me back to him?

I don’t know what I will find, but I know I need to go back to where it all began.

#

The street in Paris feels different now. It is not just the light or the rain on the pavement. There is something in the air that makes the city seem poised between past and present, waiting for lost souls to reunite.

The bookseller remembers Leo. He tells me that Leo, older now, sometimes sets up his makeshift stall near the corner. He is always alone. I almost laugh at how simple it is, after all these years, to find him. But doubt starts to settle in.

What if time has changed him more than I expect?

I wait, as the days drag on, until I find the courage to approach him.

And there he is, Leo, my love, standing by the stall, arranging books, his hair graying, his features sharpened by time and war. His body is hunched slightly, yet I know him instantly. He is very different now; old age has taken its strain on both of us.

But what if he doesn’t recognize me? What if he thought I was dead?

Then, our eyes meet, and time snaps back into place.

He blinks, as if I am a dream, a fragment of memory brought to life. I see the moment begin to shift, the second he remembers. His lips part, and in a voice rough with grief and hope, he whispers, “Juliette.”

I step forward.

So does he.

We stand before each other, changed in ways neither of us will ever fully understand. The years have carved their stories into our skin, leaving us both with wounds that will never completely heal.

He reaches out, and I take his hand.

We walk together to a quiet corner of the street. No rush. No need to fill the silence. The past, with all its pain, is finally behind us.

Then, in the middle of the street, he bends down and kisses me. It is not like our first kiss. It is something deeper. It holds everything.

When I pull back, our foreheads touch.

We do not speak. There is nothing left to say.

In that kiss, I find the closure I have long searched for, the love that was once lost.