The style of this story has suddenly gone a bit Wordsworth. I'm just going along for the ride, and I hope you will too.

Thanks to everyone who has left reviews and asked for more. Without your encouragement I no doubt would have wound this up a few chapters back. I have no intention of following H & R to their respective graves, but I am wanting to tidy up their lives post-MI-5...chiefly so that they have an honest basis on which to have a decent lifelong relationship. I think this is the least I can do, given what Kudos did to them.

On their second day back in Devon, Harry and Ruth took a walk along the beach. It was overcast, the breeze off the sea biting their exposed skin. They were both dressed for the cold in jeans, windcheaters and hooded parkas. They strolled, not touching, waiting for the other to initiate conversation. It was a comfortable silence they shared, something only people who trusted one another would embrace with ease.

Harry had been trying to find the right words since they'd packed themselves, their clothes, the animals, and some of Ruth's books into his car for the trip back to the Devon coast. If they were to make it in the long term, there were still some things he needed to tell Ruth. He believed that he needed her understanding, but most of all he wanted her forgiveness. Scarlett trotted along beside them, occasionally running off to follow yet another new smell. She was in Doggy Heaven. Fidget, on the other hand, had not enjoyed either the car trip there or her new home. She was still confined to the house for fear she'd run off and hitch a ride back to London. In a huff, she had retreated to the space under the spare bed upstairs.

Another couple, each around Harry's age, walked along the beach towards them . Hands tucked into the pockets of their parkas, they were engaged in an animated conversation which resulted in the man throwing his head back and laughing. "`Morning," they each said as they passed, displaying wide smiles. For a moment Harry suspected them of eavesdropping on he and Ruth, but then dismissed the thought, recognising the shades of the spook which still inhabited his being, and perhaps always would. That was the trouble - once a spook, always a spook.

So – he thought – here goes.

"Ruth," Harry began, "I have some things I need to talk to you about. Some things I want you to know."

"Not more secrets, I hope. I don't need to know them all. Perhaps some things need to be left in the past."

"Not these."

The wind dropped suddenly, and the sun appeared from behind a cloud. Harry Pearce was not a man who believed in signs, but be that as it may, he took this change in the weather as a sign for him to continue. He was happy to accept help from any available source, even the God he believed did not, could not exist. He had spent so much of his life dealing with the shadow side of human nature that for him the idea that a deity could be in charge of it all was preposterous, to say the least.

"Ruth, just listen. That's all I ask of you." He grabbed her hand and tucked it into the pocket of his parka, holding it there, grasped in his own. His parka was long and had deep pockets.

Ruth looked up at him with smiling eyes. "You've never done that before."

"I'm having to do a lot of things I've never done before." Like explaining my behaviour, he thought, which was something he'd not managed to do in any of his personal relationships to date.

"Ruth, please hear me out. I have to say this for both of us, but most of all I have to say it for me."

They were momentarily distracted by Scarlett barking at another dog which accompanied a lone man who walked with a fishing rod in one hand, and a tackle box in the other.

"He's optimistic," Ruth commented.

"I feel bad about the way I treated you while we worked together."

"Harry -"

"No, Ruth, I must say this. It's only becoming clear to me, now I'm away from there. It was a pressure-cooker for much of the time, and as much as I fed off that, and even enjoyed it for a time, I treated you very badly. The more I knew I loved you, the less able I was to deal with the feelings I had for you. If it wasn't you pushing me away, it was me pushing you away. I was so scared so much of the time - not of the events we had to face while on the Grid, but of loving you too much, and then losing you. I couldn't let myself indulge in that. Not only would it have interfered with the quality of our work together, but working together and being together in our private lives would have changed us. I was so afraid of so many things."

Ruth looked up at him. "Tell me what you were afraid of. Help me to understand."

"I was afraid of being rejected – by you. I was afraid that we'd be together, and happy, and then some tragedy would befall us... which it ultimately did." Harry's voice then became quieter and deeper. "Most of all I was afraid of feeling what I knew I felt for you, because then I'd have to feel the pain of the losses – of Ros and Adam and Jo, and all the others who died on my watch – and the pain of the betrayals. My work involved so much betrayal. But what was worse, I'd have to acknowledge how broken the world was, and how little difference I was making. To open up one emotional door would have meant I'd have had to open them all...and I just wasn't brave enough to do that...and I'm sorry. Instead I chose to keep you at arm's length. I'm sorry for all the times I shut you out. I'm sorry for not being prepared to trust you with this -" Harry put his free hand over his own heart. "But most of all I'm sorry for all the hurt I have caused you, and I'm sorry for all the precious time we've lost."

Ruth gently lifted her hand from his pocket, stopped, turned towards him and reached up to put her arms around his neck. She drew his head down as she embraced him. "Thank you," she said, her mouth close to his ear. "You have just given me the most extraordinarily beautiful gift."

Ruth pulled away slightly so she could look Harry in the face. He was not able to reply with words as his eyes were glistening with tears, and she could see the quivering of his bottom lip, as he battled to hold in his own emotions. Harry then slipped both his arms around her, and pulled her to him. With his face buried in her hair, he sobbed out his anguish for all the lost opportunities, the loss of her, as well as the unnecessary loss of life.

They stood that way for a long time. The laughing couple returned along the beach, giving the embracing couple a wide berth. A public beach it may have been, but some things, such as the right to privacy of a couple in love, were sacrosanct.

Much later they were sitting with a pot of tea between them, what remained of their dinner now on the cupboard beside the sink. Harry smiled into his cup.

"What is it?" Ruth asked.

"I was thinking," Harry said, "that only a month ago I'd have been drowning myself in whiskey. I would have considered that a cup of tea at this early hour might turn me into a wowser."

They went to bed early, not to make love, but to slip under the duvet together and lie side by side, holding hands. They talked into the night, mostly about their time on the Grid, sometimes about their respective childhoods, and Harry even offered a little insight into his own marriage. It was a sharing and a revealing of parts of themselves which were normally kept carefully hidden. They had each long held such things where they could not be seen, and now it was safe to bring them into the dim light from the moon which shone through their bedroom window. They fell asleep, still holding hands, their breathing in sync with the sounds of the night outside the window. Rather than terrify, as they may have done in the past, such sounds which only the night brings danced around them softly, kissing them as they slept.

Since their walk along the beach, there had been a subtle, yet perceptible, change in their togetherness. It was as though, as they'd embraced on the beach, oblivious to the world around them, the earth's axis had shifted ever so slightly, and there had been a realignment of the Moon with the Sun. Where there had previously been a kind of desperation between them, like they had to make the most of every minute they were together for fear their time would run out – now there was an acceptance that what they had, and how much more time together they'd share, was perfect in its own way. Where they had both been wary of talking about certain things from their pasts, that which they had surmised was best left in the past – now the door had been opened, there was nothing they could not face together and with honesty. Where they had both – in their separate ways – avoided talking of a future together – now their future was a vast canvas stretching before them, waiting for them to dip their brushes and paint.

I could quite easily leave the story there, but I won't.

There are a few ends I wish to tie up first.