{{user}} had always been the steady one. In the hospital, her name carried weight, spoken with respect in operating theatres and whispered with awe by junior doctors who had memorised her papers and watched her lectures twice over. Awards lined her office shelves, polished and impersonal but they were never what mattered to her. What mattered was the work. The quiet certainty of saving someone else’s life. At home, she was simply Simon’s wife. Their marriage was built in stolen moments, early mornings before deployments, late night phone calls across time zones, hands clasped too tightly at airport gates. Simon Riley was a soldier, absence was part of the contract. But when he was home, he was home. Solid. Devoted. They knew how to live in the gaps, how to hold onto each other without demanding more than the job could give. So when {{user}} started getting the headaches, she dismissed them. Stress, she told herself. Long hours.

She powered through surgeries with a dull pressure blooming behind her eyes, blinking away moments of dizziness, laughing it off when words slipped or her vision blurred for half a second too long. Her colleagues noticed before she admitted anything aloud. They noticed the tremor in her hand. The way she paused mid sentence, searching for words she’d never struggled to find before. “You’re never off,” one of them said gently. “Let us run a scan. Just to be safe.” {{user}} almost refused. Almost. The MRI changed everything. She stared at the images long after the room emptied, clinical detachment crumbling as reality set in. A tumour. Large. Obvious. Sitting in her brain like a quiet betrayal. Benign, the report said. She cried anyway. For days. She took leave without telling Simon the truth, telling him only that she needed rest, that work had finally caught up with her. He accepted it, reluctantly but he trusted her. He always had. But the tumour didn’t stay quiet.

It began to press, to interfere, to rewrite small pieces of who she was. {{user}} laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. Made sharp comments that didn’t sound like her. Once, she started giggling in the middle of the night for no reason at all, the sound foreign enough that Simon had turned over in bed and stared at her, concerned. “You alright, love?” he’d asked softly. “Fine,” she’d said too quickly, wiping at her eyes. “Just tired.” She hated herself for lying. But she was scared to tell him. To have to face the truth. The day he found out, she’d left the scan results on the kitchen table by accident. Paperwork spilled where it never usually did, her mind foggy, distracted. He set his mug down on the table and that’s when he saw it. A report. He didn’t mean to read it. He just saw his wife’s name. The word tumour. The phrase benign but extensive. Surgical intervention required. His chest went cold.

{{user}} found him in the kitchen minutes later, mid laugh at something on her phone that wasn’t funny at all, until she saw his face. “{{user}},” he said, voice low, controlled in the way that meant it was barely holding together. He held up the report. “What is this? She froze. Her smile faltered. Then vanished. “You went through my things?” “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded, the words breaking through anyway. “How long have you known? Why would you hide something like this from me?” She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her hands shook. “I didn’t want to be that,” she said finally, voice cracking. “The problem. The thing you had to worry about when you’re already out there—” Simon stepped closer, disbelief and hurt cutting through the concern. “You have a brain tumour,” he said. “And you didn’t tell me.” Her composure finally shattered. “I didn’t want to scare you,” she whispered. “You’re already gone so much. I didn’t want this to be another thing you couldn’t fix.”

His anger faded instantly, replaced by something raw and aching. He pulled her into his chest, like he was afraid she might disappear. “You don’t get to go through this alone,” he murmured into her hair. {{user}} nodded against him, tears soaking into his shirt.