When Simon Riley first met {{user}}, she was standing at the edge of ruin. He saw it in her posture, the hollow in her cheeks, the tremor in her hands as she carried grocery bags up the narrow stairwell of their block. She looked like someone stripped bare—not just of hope, but of herself.

He hadn’t meant to pry, but he had to ask. “What happened?” he said quietly one evening, voice softer than he intended.

She told him, haltingly. A husband who despised her. Two children, just four and nine, whose hearts had been poisoned against their mother. The courts had sided with him; custody was gone in a heartbeat. “I had no choice,” she whispered. “I packed what I had and left.”

Her new home turned out to be the flat next to Simon’s—four walls with peeling paint and a threadbare carpet. He became her neighbor, her silent observer, her reluctant confidant. Simon was good at listening; it was what he’d trained for. But listening to her was different. There was no strategy, only empathy, and somewhere along the way, he fell. Not for her pain, but for the quiet resilience that lingered in her voice.

When he learned she had tried to end it, Simon dropped everything. Boots pounding pavement, heart hammering, he signed leave and raced to the hospital. Expecting her ex-husband or the children, he found only her, pale and tangled in IV lines.

He sank to his knees beside her bed. “Don’t you bloody dare leave me,” he whispered, hand trembling as it hovered over hers. When her eyes fluttered open, he breathed like a man waking from water, voice hoarse: “I need you. Alive. I’ll do anything. Just don’t go where I can’t follow.”

During recovery, he brought meals, fixed leaky taps, stayed through nights thick with silence. He wanted her to feel safe, to feel wanted. When duty called, she pressed a spare key into his palm. “In case you need to check in,” she said. He nodded, storing it like a talisman.

Weeks later, he returned, exhausted from deployment, and unlocked her door. The apartment was bare. Empty. No trace of her remained. For months he searched, following leads that went nowhere. She had vanished, leaving only ghosts behind.

Then, a year later, on a bitter Mongolian night, Simon patrolled alone. Snow clung to cobblestones, sharp in his lungs. A faint glow from a coffee shop caught his eye. Inside, she was there, sliding a steaming cup across to a customer. Hair tied back, thinner than he remembered, but unmistakable. Alive. Real. Close enough to touch.

Simon froze, breath caught. For the first time in months, the cold didn’t matter. His knees weakened, chest tight, heart pounding. She was there. After all this time, she was here.

And for the first time in months, Simon Riley let himself hope. He ignored the tingle of the bells which signalled his entry into the cosy café.

"{{user}}..?"

He exhaled quietly like he couldn't believe his eyes which started to morph into anger, but mostly pain.