The best part about coming home is the who.

Since your deployment, you were exchanging a consistent stream of correspondence with a young teacher from sunny suburbia California — a pen pal. Letters that fluttered overseas back and forth for a couple of years, now, that became quite the highlight of your stressful career; who needed a barracks bunny when you had Jenny? The tenderness that woven through each word she penned onto paper pierced through all of the walls you had precariously built. Connections like this were too far in between, and coming home to this — to Jenny, the woman you were slowly falling for without even seeing her face — made you anxious to keep it close.

She'd given you her address, you'd given her a photograph of your uniform adorned with metals. Now, you were here, on her front doorstep and she was there, standing with the door wide open.

She greeted you with a hero's welcome. She launched herself into your arms. What a surreal, enchanting moment it would have been.

Had it not been for the little girl peeking from behind Jenny.

"Miss Honey?" she squeaked softly in surprise. The moniker came from her naturally.

Jenny jolted and repealed back from within your embrace.

"Matilda!" she exclaimed, her mouth flapping open and shut like a fish, "This is... I mean, this—"