The ancient oak’s branches swayed against the gathering storm as Eleanor stood before her grandmother’s cottage, clutching a small leather pouch. Inside were seeds—precise, measured seeds her grandmother had given her on her deathbed just days ago.

“Only plant these when you’re ready to find what you’ve lost,” her grandmother’s words echoed in her mind, carried by the howling wind across the Yorkshire moors.

Eleanor ran her fingers over the rough leather, feeling each seed’s distinct shape through the material. The air crackled with electricity, heavy with the promise of rain and something more—something older than the weathered stones of the cottage behind her.

“What have I truly lost?” she whispered to the darkening sky. The question seemed to ripple through time itself.

The first drop of rain fell as she opened the pouch. Seven seeds, each one different, yet perfectly formed. Without fully understanding why, Eleanor knew this moment could not wait. She knelt in the rich soil and planted them in a perfect circle.

Thunder rolled across the moors as she pressed the last seed into the earth. The world shifted, blurred, then reformed around her like watercolors bleeding into new shapes.

She found herself in the same spot, but the cottage behind her was new, its stones unmarked by time. A man stood at the garden gate, his dark eyes fixed upon her with an intensity that made her breath catch.

“I’ve been waiting,” he said simply, as if her arrival through time was the most natural thing in the world. “I’m William.”

“How did you know I would come?” Eleanor’s voice trembled slightly.

William smiled, a gentle expression that seemed to hold centuries of patience. “The seeds always know. They’ve been passed down through generations, waiting for the right moment to bring together what time has torn apart.”

“And what has time torn apart?”

“Us.” He stepped closer, and Eleanor felt something ancient and familiar stir in her soul. “In every life, we find each other. But this time, something went wrong. You were born too late, I too early.”

The rain fell harder now, but neither moved to seek shelter. Eleanor’s mind filled with fragments of memories that weren’t quite her own—lives lived, loves shared, all connected by these precise seeds that bridged the gaps between times.

“What happens now?” she asked, though deep down she knew the answer.

“That depends on you,” William replied. “The seeds have given us this moment, but moments pass. We can let time separate us again, or…”

“Or?”

“Or we trust in what the seeds have shown us. Stay here, in this time. Write our own story.”

Eleanor looked back at where her grandmother’s cottage should be—would be. “Is that even possible?”

“The seeds are never wrong,” William said softly. “They’ve been waiting centuries for this precise moment, this exact alignment of souls.”

Standing there in the rain, Eleanor faced the choice that would define not just one life, but many. The seeds had brought her here, but what they had truly given her was the power to choose her own destiny.

She looked into William’s eyes and saw all the lives they had shared, all the times they had found and lost each other. And in that moment, she understood what her grandmother had meant about finding what was lost.

Sometimes, she realized, what we lose isn’t a thing or a memory, but a possibility—a future that was meant to be ours all along.

Eleanor reached for William’s hand, and the rain ceased.