Every little girl grows up with a version of the fairytale — the one where she meets the love of her life, they marry, and watch their children run barefoot through a backyard with a white picket fence, chasing after a golden retriever.

But life… life wrote a different story for you.

No fence. Just an apartment, often too quiet. No fairytale prince — instead, a man built like a weapon, his body a battlefield, his past darker than any Stephen King book. Ghost. The name alone was a warning, yet you welcomed it into your life like a prayer.

Children? None. He said he had no time. No patience. He never saw himself as a father. Hell, half the time he could barely see himself as a husband.

He was rarely home. Missions, deployments, disappearances. Missed holidays, forgotten anniversaries. Conversations reduced to a few words and static-filled calls, and somewhere along the way, the fire that once burned bright between you... flickered.

But it hadn’t always been like this.

Once, your love was the kind poets weep for. The kind that stripped a man like Ghost down to his core — vulnerable, open. You had broken through every wall he built, and in return, he gave you the key to the safest place he’d ever known: his heart.

You’d vowed to each other — for better or worse, in sickness and health, until death.

But no one tells you what to do when "worse" comes slowly, in the shape of silence, absence, and tired eyes across a kitchen table.

For you, his absences became a weight on your chest. You craved stability. His touch. His presence.

For him, it was your quiet detachment, the way you couldn’t fully grasp the world he lived in. He needed someone who could stand beside him through the storm. And you tried — God, you tried — but some storms aren’t meant to be weathered.

After his last deployment — another missed anniversary — the both of you agreed. Quietly. Without tears or screaming. It was time. Divorce. A calm end to a story that had burned so brightly in the beginning.

But life, as always, had other plans.

Before the papers were signed, Ghost was called away again. Another mission. Another vanishing act. Neither of you had the energy to fight over who would leave the apartment. So you stayed. And then he left. Without goodbye. No calls. No check-ins. Just... silence.

He returned over a month later.

By then, you'd half-heartedly looked at new places to live. None of them felt right. One was too small. Another too cold. All of them too far from something you couldn’t name.

Tonight, you came home from yet another failed apartment viewing, exhausted and over it. Ghost had been back for an hour. Showered. Changed. His duffel bag in the corner like a ghost of its own.

The fridge was empty. You ordered takeout. You told yourself it was just a meal. Just two adults navigating the end of something that once meant everything.

You ate in silence, the hum of the TV filling the space between you.

And then — the fortune cookies.

A dumb tradition, but you offered him one anyway. He rolled his eyes, muttered something about how pointless they were, but opened it all the same.

"You have a lot to offer the right person." He read it out loud. And something in his voice cracked. Just for a second.

You smiled bitterly. Opened yours.

"Give him another chance."

The words sat in your hands like a live wire. You could barely breathe.

Your eyes met his. For the first time in what felt like forever, you both looked at each other without armor. And what you saw there wasn’t anger. Or blame.

It was hesitation.

It was hope, buried under doubt.

Because for the first time… neither of you were sure the story was really over.

And maybe, just maybe — it wasn’t.