Roy - Stuart Glimpse 10

The woman was hunched on a bus-stop bench, wrestling a stubborn pram wheel. She had the same small, bird-like bones, the same way of tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with a huff of frustration. For ten seconds, time stopped.

Roy’s throat closed. She’d been dead five years. He watched the woman finally free the wheel, straighten up—and the illusion shattered. This face was younger, rounder, the eyes a different shade of hazel. A stranger. roy stuart glimpse 10

Yet as she pushed the pram past him, the baby inside waved a star-shaped rattle. Roy caught his own reflection in the wet window of a parked car: a fifty-two-year-old man in a rumpled suit, holding a forgotten briefcase, tears cutting clean tracks through the city grime. The woman was hunched on a bus-stop bench,

Mum.

Then the bus pulled up, the woman boarded, and the scent of mint faded back to diesel. Roy Stuart stood a moment longer, then smiled—a real smile, the first in years—and walked on. Roy’s throat closed

It was the scent that stopped Roy Stuart mid-stride on the rain-slicked London pavement. Not the usual city brew of diesel and damp concrete, but something greener—wild mint and rain-soaked ferns, a ghost of the Derbyshire hills he’d left twenty years ago.

He turned, certain the source would be a greengrocer’s bin or a spilled herbal tea. Instead, he saw her .