Disclaimer: I own nothing, no profit is made. Characters owned, created, and occasionally neglected by Anthony Horowitz.

Author's Note: First fic, ever (gulp). Written in honor of the anniversary of Rosalind Foyle's death.

HEAPS OF THANKS due to OxfordKivrin for her very patient betaing and kind encouragement. This wouldn't have gone anywhere without her!

Fifteen Years

February 21st, 1947

He stood in the cemetery on a cold, grey February day, looking down at the simple headstone of his young wife.

Rosalind Foyle, June 1902- February 1932

He swallowed hard and bit his lip. One hand was buried deep in the pocket of his overcoat; the other clutched a bouquet of fast-wilting roses.

Fifteen years.

Some days it felt like he had been alone forever; other days he woke up and was surprised to find the other side of the bed vacant. Since she had left him, he had raised a child, been through a war, left the police, crossed an ocean and back, and delivered more bad news than any one person should have to in a lifetime. But standing looking at the tombstone, Foyle couldn't believe it had been fifteen years since the day he lost his wife.

He remembered those last days so clearly, so starkly, all the memories pervaded with a helpless feeling of numb, growing horror. What started as a routine illness had descended so quickly into a nightmare.

The first week, it had been a minor complaint: headache, low fever, general exhaustion; a trifling illness that Foyle treated with his usual affectionate concern, though Rosalind had grumbled a bit at his solicitude. But by the second week she was so much worse she didn't put up a fight when he insisted on phoning the doctor. One look at her flushed cheeks and the newly-appeared red spots on her stomach was all it took for the doctor to make his diagnosis: Typhoid. It was in the middle of the second week that Foyle had realized the disease was winning, that it might really take her. By the third week, she was in hospital; they both knew she was dying. And by the end of the fourth week, she was gone.

He had been with her, that last night. Andrew, at fourteen fully aware of the situation but refusing to talk about it, had visited earlier that evening and said a solemn goodbye, his face pale and unreadable, before going home with his aunt. But Foyle stayed, sitting by her hospital bed, holding her hand while she slept, listening to her breathing get weaker and weaker. After watching her sleep for several hours, he too had dropped into a doze. He did not stir until early the next morning, when the nurses woke him gently and eased her cold hand from his warm one.

There was the phone call to Andrew – the breaking of the news, the silence on the other end, the clatter as Andrew dropped the receiver and ran away. There was the week of chaotic planning – arranging the service, contacting all the friends and family, sorting through Rosalind's possessions while her sister-in-law was there to help. There was the funeral – a cold, inappropriately sunny day in early March, the cemetery full of early crocuses and snowdrops that contrasted starkly with the grey and black mass of mourners. And there was the endless restraint, the endless politeness, and the endless, necessary stifling of all feeling while the rituals attending a death were gone through.

But finally the last prayers had been said, the last hands shaken, the last condolences accepted, and he and Andrew trudged alone up the hill to Steep Lane.

The reality of what had happened didn't hit him until they walked into the empty house, just the two of them for the first time since Rosalind had gone to hospital. As they took off their coats and wandered into the sitting room, he suddenly realized that this was it. The formal mourning was over; it was time to return to "normal" in a life that could never be normal again.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If the days preceding Rosalind's death stood out clearly, every bleak, terrible detail irrevocably engraved in his mind, the weeks and months afterwards were a long blur of dull pain and a sense of being underwater, separated from reality as they struggled through day-to-day life without her. Foyle found himself suddenly having to shoulder the full burden of running a household, overwhelmed with all the cooking, cleaning, and washing that Rosalind had always taken care of, on top of raising a son and working full time.

His first day back at work, Foyle strode into the station with mouth tightly set and eyes shuttered, nodding curtly to all expressions of sympathy and throwing himself back into the job with such focus that the younger officers quickly forgot he had a personal life, let alone such a tragic one.

Andrew, too, retreated into himself; previously a cheerful, capable scholar, he dropped to the bottom of his class and started picking fights over nothing, frequently coming home with black eyes and bloodied fists.

Never comfortable with overt displays of emotion, Foyle struggled to help his son cope while still wrestling with his own grief. He tried to simply be there for him, ready with an anguished look or a warm clasp on his shoulder to communicate his shared pain. Occasionally he would manage a hoarse, gentle "D'you want to talk about it?" But Andrew, looking at once proud and frightened and defiant, always shook his head. Foyle, not trusting himself not to break down, never pushed him.

This had continued until one day about four months after the funeral, when Foyle finally dug out the picture of Rosalind he been unable to look at for so long. He had set it out in the sitting room with the intention of carrying it up to his own room later, but when he came out of the kitchen that evening to call Andrew for dinner, he found him staring at it, studying it intently.

"…Andrew?"

His son turned to him with a queer expression. His face was pale and blotchy like he was going to cry, but his eyes were clear and wide and frightened. "I was forgetting what she looked like."

Foyle could only stare, stricken, as Andrew slipped passed him and disappeared into the kitchen.

He knew then that something had to be done.

Foyle thought hard while they started to eat, then finally made up his mind. Setting his knife and fork down on the side of his plate, he cleared his throat and looked up at his son. "I want to talk about mum."

Andrew's eyes widened and stared back at him warily, looking so much like Rosalind that Foyle had to look away. He swallowed the hitch in his throat and moved on quickly. "I'm sorry…that we never talk about her." He paused. Andrew's expression didn't change. "I don't want…I don't want…you to forget things about her, or to feel that you can't talk about her." This time he looked hard at his son, demanding a response before continuing.

Andrew gave one terse nod and ducked his head.

Emboldened, Foyle went on. "I don't want you to forget the way she used to laugh when you would say something funny…the way she used to dance when the wireless was on…the way she used to sing while doing the washing. I don't want you to forget…how she used to tuck you in bed when you were little…kiss all your scrapes and bruises when you got hurt…hold you tight and stroke your hair when you were frightened." His voice was rough and slow and full of pain, but he cleared his throat and made himself finish. "I don't want you to forget…and Andrew, I don't want to forget. So please…" His voice cracked, his eyes stung, he could barely breathe around the lump in his throat. He couldn't manage any more.

But then, Andrew looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed and brimming, but he nodded and choked out, "I don't want to forget. And I miss her, dad."

They both cried a little, then, sitting at either end of the table and sniffling softly, privately, not looking at each other, apart yet together in their grief. Finally Foyle cleared his throat, wiped his face with his handkerchief, and handed it across the table to Andrew.

He took it and blew his nose. Then, with a glance at his half-empty plate, Andrew smiled crookedly, and said a little haltingly, "I remember…mum's cooking…and I miss it!"

Foyle let out a laugh that was half a sob. "I remember when she used to be able to get YOU to help with the washing up."

"I remember when she banished you from the kitchen because you left the bread in the oven and the whole kitchen filled up with smoke and Mrs. Thompson called the fire station!"

"Wull, I remember when she caught YOU tracking mud on the carpet, and…"

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Things had been easier after that night. The picture of Rosalind stayed on the end table, and perhaps that helped. There was still the pain, still the ever-present emptiness, but they shared it more comfortably, and slowly they began to heal.

For the first eight years after Rosalind's death, they always went to the cemetery on February 21st. They would each bring a small bouquet of flowers and stand there silently for a while, thinking and remembering and occasionally mentioning some long-forgotten memory.

Andrew's first winter at Oxford was a busy one for the Hastings Constabulary, so it was only a few days before the anniversary when Foyle realized with a pang that he would have to make the annual visit alone. But on the evening of the 20th, coming home after a long day's work, Foyle walked into the sitting room to find Andrew, sprawled in his usual armchair and grinning up at him broadly.

"Andrew! What…?"

"Thought it was about time I came home for a visit."

"It's the middle of term!"

Andrew stood up, laughing at his father's obvious distress. "Don't worry, dad. I haven't left, and I haven't been sent down." At the still-sharply-questioning look on Foyle's face, he added, more seriously, "You didn't think I'd forget, did you?"

A rush of warmth surged through him, but Foyle held back. "And they've let you off?"

"Oh, yes. Mr. Lewis is a good sort, he understood. I don't have to be back till Monday."

Foyle's face softened. "Well. I…didn't expect you." The corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes held Andrew's in a warm smile. "But I'm very glad you've come."

He had made the trek down from Oxford every year, after that. Even in the first February of the war, when bitter weather and still-unfamiliar blackout regulations made travel arduous, Andrew was there. So it was perhaps not unreasonable, the following year, for Foyle to be secretly hoping his son would show up, especially considering he was stationed so nearby. Surely he would know how much Foyle needed him there this year, after all the worry of the past nine months, and in the face of all the uncertainty of the future.

He didn't entirely give up hope until he was standing at the grave alone, and even then he stalled for nearly a quarter of an hour before, heart sinking, he accepted that Andrew wasn't coming. Foyle berated himself for having expected him in the first place; there was a War on. And it seemed nothing was to be left untouched by that bloody War.

Andrew had felt terrible about it, and after that he always wrote a few days before the anniversary to assure his father he hadn't forgotten, and to warn him he wouldn't be able to make it.

So for the duration Foyle had visited the grave alone, with Sam a quiet (well, usually quiet), sympathetic companion. She would drive him there, walk with him through the gates, then sit down on a bench a discreet distance away until he was finished. On the way back to the station, she would sometimes ask a few hesitant questions about Mrs. Foyle, always very gently and for once never overstepping the line.

The first year after the war ended, however, Foyle had been the one unable to make it. Across an ocean, hot on the heels of the murderer Howard Paige, Foyle kept the anniversary with a quiet drink in his drab hotel room, making a private toast to Rosalind as he replayed some of his more precious memories of her. It was some consolation that a few days later he'd received a letter from Andrew, assuring him that he had been to the cemetery and left flowers on the grave, although it hadn't entirely assuaged his own guilt at not being there.

But now he was back in England, and for the first time in almost 30 years Foyle had requested a couple days of leave. On the 21st of February, Foyle didn't go into work, but instead took the early train down to Hastings, stopping only to buy flowers before walking to the cemetery.

He had been standing by the grave, remembering, for over a quarter of an hour. The sullen gray clouds had finally broken into a reluctant drizzle; his coat and hat were wet. He blinked slowly, coming back to the present, and bent to place the flowers at the foot of the grave.

"Dad?"

Foyle spun around, startled.

"Andrew!"

His son was hurrying towards him with long, eager strides, a briefcase swinging easily from one hand and a bunch of flowers clasped in the other. He halted a few feet in front of his father and grinned. "Hi, dad."

Foyle's face creased into a warm smile as his sharp eyes sized Andrew up quickly. Between MI5 and Andrew's new job in the City they were rarely able to get together, and Foyle hadn't seen his son since Christmas.

A little taller, a little broader, a little leaner in the face, something else about Andrew seemed different, too. And it struck Foyle quite suddenly that the boy whom he had brought to this graveyard, on this day, for so many years, was now a grown man.

His smart business suit hidden by a long overcoat and a dark brown trilby pulled low over his eyes, Andrew looked remarkably like his father – but in his son's warm dark eyes and wide smile, all Foyle could see was Rosalind.

"You didn't say you were coming."

"Neither did you."

"Wull, didn't want to nag."

They stood smiling at each other for a moment, then Andrew made a slight gesture with his flowers.

"I brought these…"

They turned back to the grave. Quietly Andrew walked up to it and set the bouquet down next to Foyle's before backing up to stand next to his father.

"Fifteen years," Andrew said softly.

"Yep." A pause. "Sorry I couldn't be here last year."

"After five years coming by yourself?" Andrew brushed it off with a shake of his head. "Served me right." He hesitated. "I wanted to say…I'm sorry, dad, that I missed all those years. I know it was the war, but it was bloody awful being here alone last year, and…I'm sorry."

Foyle inclined his head gently, one corner of his mouth tilting downwards. "Couldn't matter less."

There was another pause, then, with an effort, Foyle said, "She…would've been proud of you. Oxford. The RAF. Now this." He cocked a mock-amused eyebrow at his son's sharp business clothes.

Andrew chuckled, but answered seriously. "Thanks, dad." He paused, suddenly looking very much the insecure, motherless boy again. "Do you…still miss her? Still think about her?"

Foyle's reply was long in coming, and when it finally did it was so low and hoarse that Andrew almost missed it.

"Every day."

They stood silently for a long while, shoulders nearly brushing, hat brims pulled down low against the rain.

Finally Foyle broke the stillness.

"Well," he began in a lighter tone, "I haven't been back to the house yet. Like to come? Mmight be able to dig up an old bottle of Glenlivet."

Andrew laughed – Rosalind's sudden, infectious laugh. "Sure, dad," he grinned. "Let's go home."

FIN