ASHES TO EMPIRE

Episode2

When I woke the next morning, the city was already buzzing, choked with sirens and the screech of buses braking too hard at junctions. For a moment, I believed I was still seventeen, lying on the lumpy mattress in my mum’s council flat, counting the cracks in the ceiling. But I wasn’t. I was twenty-five, with a degree in engineering that had taken twice as long as it should have. I had nothing but student debt and a part-time job at a hardware store on Holloway Road.

I stood at the mirror brushing my teeth, staring at the reflection of a man who had spent too long trying to be invisible. Unshaven, heavy-eyed, and wearing the same hoodie I’d had since sixth form. Still, something was different.

Yesterday, it seemed to have opened a door for me, a door for a better future.

It started when I bumped into Ronan Birkley.

He wasn’t just a man. He was a name – “the oil magnate” who occasionally showed up on the cover of The Times or Fortune, but to me, he’d always been Mr. Birkley, the man who once gave me his umbrella outside the King’s Cross station when I was thirteen and soaked to the bone. He remembered me, astonishingly, when I delivered timber to a site his company owned. Said I looked "tense like a kettle" and asked what I did for work.

“Engineering,” I said too quickly. “Well. Graduated. But I’m... figuring things out.”

He looked at me a moment too long, then scribbled on a card. "Come by my office. Don’t be late."

Hours later, I sat in the waiting room of Birkley Petroleum Ltd., unable to stop shaking my foot. A secretary with pin-straight blond hair and impossibly white teeth offered me coffee. I declined. My stomach was already a tightening fist. I didn’t reject because of my tummy, but because I did not feel worthy to hold the golden coffee cup, with my ragged-looking self. I smelled like poverty.

When I was finally called in, Birkley didn’t offer me a seat. He simply said, “Tell me why you’re wasting time when you’re clearly clever.”

The question was both a challenge and a test, I knew that.

I told him the truth.

I’d made all A’s at school, but no one clapped at the graduation ceremony because no one came. How my fiancée, Jasmine, had gotten pregnant during the second year and left me the moment I couldn’t provide a flat or a future. How her parents had taken her in, and told me never to contact her again. How my father died drunk and bitter, and how our house and everything he owned were taken over by his cousin when we couldn’t pay the debts.

Birkley listened without blinking.

Then he said, “You’ve got something most of my executives don’t, which is the taste of hunger. I’ll give you one year. One shot. You fail, you’re out.”

I swallowed so hard cause it hurt. “What’s the role?”

“Junior project engineer, offshore. It’s cold work. Nothing glamorous.”

But I wasn’t listening anymore. I was nodding, breathless, dizzy with the thoughts of working already.

When I stepped out of the building, it felt like time in there was static. Like, it froze. Outside was dark already, yet the lighting in the office made it look like it was day.

It was late, and I walked home, not caring that the wind scraped at my cheeks or that the tube was packed shoulder to shoulder. I wanted to scream. Not in fear, but in something close to joy. Something I hadn’t felt since before Jasmine told me she was keeping the baby, and then vanished into silence.

I didn’t tell anyone, not Mum, not Marlon, my closest mate from childhood, who still lived in our estate and sold weed from the back of his cousin’s barbershop. I didn’t know how to explain it without sounding delusional. I just packed and left London the next week.

I left in the morning when my mom was still asleep. I walked over to her bedside and planted a soft kiss on her cheek, then tiptoed outside. I sprayed the perfume on myself outside the one room we lived in. I did that so as not to distract my mom’s sleep with the fragrance while she was asleep.

Aberdeen was grey, harsh, and smelled faintly of diesel and seaweed. But it was a beginning, I knew I would get used to it.

I remained there working and doing all that was required of me. Learning at the same time. As months passed, I learned quickly. Offshore work was brutal indeed. Cold, both physical and isolating. But I earned respect fast. I wasn’t the cleverest in the room, but I was the one who stayed late, double-checked the designs, and kept my boots laced when everyone else had retired. I understood I wasn’t like them. I was on a trial period.

I thought Jasmine might call. That maybe, in some moment of nostalgia or regret, she’d text, but she didn’t, and I didn’t even know if the baby had been born or was alive. All I had was the memory of her soft voice telling me I was supposed to do more, lest I wouldn’t make a good father. That she couldn’t raise a child with someone who had “nothing but ideas.”

One night, in the common room on the rig, I saw her on TV. Not Jasmine, her father. Charles Ainsley. He was being questioned by MPs about shady development deals. A scandal. It barely made the front page, but I knew. This was the kind of news that made old money tremble.

So I laughed.

I knew then that one day they’d come back, including Jasmine, and my family. Even my father’s cousin, who now drove a Jaguar and wore double-breasted suits like he hadn’t once sold our sofa for drug money. I thought about my mother too.

Three years later, I returned to London in a black car, windows tinted, hired by Birkley himself to lead a new expansion division. My salary could’ve bought out the entire estate I grew up in. My flat overlooked the river while I wore Italian shoes and tailored coats.

Then one afternoon, I found a boy at my gate.

He was there standing… Ringing the doorbell. I saw him from my room window facing the gate.

Freckles, curly hair, no older than six.

He was holding a small envelope in one hand and a red toy car in the other. I opened the gate slowly, my chest already folding in on itself.

“Are you Elliot?” he asked, voice small and steady.

I nodded.

I got the envelope and opened it. It had my name on it, and inside was a letter with Jasmine’s handwriting. I’d not forget it.

And two words written in block capitals: HE’S YOURS.

I looked down, the boy was staring at me, expectant. I crouched to his level. “What’s your name?”

He smiled. “Elias.”

My heart stopped.

She had named him after me.

Before I could speak, I heard a car engine rev behind me. I turned just in time to see a familiar face step out of a black BMW.

It was Jasmine “Don’t get too comfortable,” she said. “He might be yours, but you don’t know the whole story.”