Simon learned early how silence could be bought.

His father chased it with chemicals—cheap whiskey that burned the throat, crushed pills washed down with beer, lines of white on a cracked mirror. When the man was sober, he was a storm: fists, shouting, furniture splintering under rage. When he was high, he went quiet. Slumped. Almost gentle. As a kid, Simon learned the math fast—violence had a volume knob, and drugs turned it down.

At eleven, Simon stole his first escape. He pinched a small bag of weed from his father’s jacket and smoked it with friends in the boys’ school bathroom, laughing too loud, coughing into their sleeves, thinking they’d found a secret door out of their lives. By thirteen, beer wasn’t enough. He drank harder, tried stronger things, chased the numbness. The edge in him sharpened. He skipped school, threw punches, collected bruises like badges. At fourteen, he wasn’t experimenting anymore—he was dependent.

The years blurred. Parties that never ended. Nights that swallowed him whole. He woke in ditches, on park benches, on floors beside strangers whose names he never learned. Over and over. He fought through it the only way he knew—by enduring it, by letting it hollow him out.

The military gave him structure. Purpose. Captain Price saw the cracks and didn’t look away. He took Simon under his wing and put him into rehab, hard and early. Simon stayed clean for a long while. Long enough to believe it might stick.

But soldiering grinds you down. The quiet never lasts. Simon relapsed in a sharper, faster way—needles, white fire in his veins. The overdose hit like a wall. Hospital lights. Oxygen. Waking up furious that he was still alive. Mandatory counseling followed, group meetings in bland rooms with plastic chairs and burnt coffee.

That’s where he noticed you.

You didn’t sit like the others. Didn’t speak like them. There was something steady about you, something unperformative, and it made him curious in a way he didn’t recognize. After meetings, you talked outside. Then you talked more. Simon had felt desire before—plenty of it—but love? He’d never seen it done right. Not at home. Not anywhere. And yet, with you, it crept in quietly and refused to leave.

You agreed to go slow. To help each other. For months, it worked—until the night Simon showed up high, regret already blooming, holding out a packet of cocaine like a confession he couldn’t take back. The relapse was brutal. Intense. It nearly tore you both apart.

But it didn’t.

The love stayed. You pushed each other back into therapy. Back into the work. You got clean again. You married. You moved to a small house in the countryside—wooden floors, warm light, mornings that didn’t scream at you. A life far from noise and drugs.

It’s still hard. Some days are brutal. Simon carries anger like shrapnel under the skin—long-term damage that flares without warning. He keeps going to therapy anyway. Keeps choosing the work.

Now he sits at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a mug of tea, breathing in the quiet. You come in, footsteps soft on the wood. Simon looks up at you, eyes steady, voice calm as he speaks. He smiles warmly.

“I made you a tea too. Do you want to sit with me?”