Chapter 2 - A little more context

Before I take you into the moment we met on that train in 2005, I want to offer a little more context — not as justification, but as a way of helping you understand the emotional terrain we were both walking across. Stories like this don’t begin at the moment two people lock eyes. They begin years earlier, in the quiet fractures and unspoken longings that shape who we are when someone unexpected steps into our life.

  • I was 43. She was 40.
  • I was a military man, shaped by structure, duty, and the unspoken expectation to simply “get on with it.” She was an academic — sharp, articulate, grounded in a world of ideas and inquiry.
  • I had been married for 23 years, with two children who were already finding their own paths. She was single, never married, no children, living with her mother while preparing to start a new job in the North East.

On paper, we were two people whose lives should never have intersected. But life rarely respects the neat lines we draw for ourselves.

I know some readers may feel uneasy at this point. That’s understandable. All I ask is that you stay with me a little longer. Human stories are rarely tidy, and the truth is often more complicated than the headlines we give it.

Ten years before that train journey, while serving overseas, my life had come frighteningly close to ending. One moment I was carrying out my duties; the next, I was in an induced coma, suspended in a kind of darkness that felt both endless and strangely peaceful. When I woke, the world felt sharper, louder, slightly off-kilter — as if someone had tilted the axis of my life by a few degrees.

I spent two months in hospital. I returned to duty eventually, but something inside me had shifted. I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew I felt different — more restless, more reckless, more aware of how thin the line is between living and not living.

It took more than twenty years to finally receive a diagnosis of PTSD. A mild case, they said. Mild or not, it explained the emotional turbulence, the sense of being unfulfilled, the quiet ache that followed me even in moments that should have felt complete. It explained why I struggled to stay still, why I chased experiences, why I felt as though I was watching my own life from a slight distance.

Nearly a decade after that illness, I reached a point where I could no longer maintain my marriage. There was no dramatic explosion, no single moment of betrayal or anger. Just a slow, steady realisation that I was living a life that no longer fit. I volunteered for a post in London, knowing my wife would stay in Scotland with the children. I moved into a one-bedroom flat — small, quiet, anonymous — with a travel card that gave me unlimited access to the city. For the first time in years, I felt both free and unmoored.

And that’s where our paths began to drift toward each other.

On the day we met, she was in transition too — shuttling between her mother’s home in the Midlands and her new job in the North East, balancing the excitement of a fresh start with the uncertainty of not yet having a place to call her own. She was between chapters, between homes, between versions of herself.

So there we were: two people in motion, both carrying more history than we realised, both standing at the edge of something neither of us could have predicted.

If any of this resonates — or if you have questions, thoughts, or even strong opinions — click “follow” and join the conversation. I’d genuinely like to hear what you think.

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