The Fight I Lost

November 1918. Edinburgh. The Armistice has been signed, but for Henry MacLeod, the war isn't over.At thirty-five, the Scottish lawyer buries his wife, Moira-another casualty of the Spanish flu-and stands alone in the kirkyard with his grief and the arm he left behind on the battlefield. Then Alex Reid appears: pathologist, wartime lover, the man Henry swore he'd never see again.Henry calls what happened between them a mistake-stress, desperation, the chaos of war. Alex isn't convinced. Neither, in his quieter moments, is Henry.Alex brings more than memories to Henry's door. He brings files. Wounded men are coming home to find their war pensions refused over misfiled papers and procedural faults, and Alex wants Henry to fight for them. One lost his hand at a clearing station, then lost his pension to a gap in his discharge papers. Case by case, Henry argues their appeals before the War Pensions Committee with his own right sleeve pinned flat at his side, and case by case, Alex draws closer.But in 1918, love between men is a crime, and Edinburgh is a city of careful arrangements. A widower in Henry's position has everything to lose: his practice, his good name, his liberty. What passed between them one night in a dugout could ruin him in peacetime.As a city still reeling from war and plague slowly finds its feet, Alex becomes the one steady thing in Henry's unravelling world: patient, present, unwilling to let Henry hide from what he felt in the trenches, or from what he still feels now.Henry has spent his life building walls-a marriage, a career, a version of himself he could live with. Alex is asking him to tear them down.The question isn't whether Henry loved once, in secret, under fire. It's whether he has the courage to love again, in the light.Set among the kirkyards, hearing rooms and hospital courtyards of Edinburgh in the winter of 1918, The Fight I Lost is a slow-burn LGBTQ+ historical romance about grief, disability and second chances, and about two men discovering whether a love forged in the First World War can survive the peace.