Hospitals never felt right to Simon. Too clean, too sterile, too quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed on the chest instead of giving peace. He’d spent years in blood-soaked sand, crumbling buildings, and dead silence between firefights—but none of it unnerved him like the hush of this place. Because here, it wasn’t enemies he was fighting. It was time.

He came every day. Sometimes in uniform, sometimes still smelling faintly of gunpowder and rain after a mission. Sometimes he stayed the night, hunched in that too-small chair beside your bed, boots planted wide, arms crossed, mask tugged down just enough so Elaine and Rowan could see his face when they came. Elaine clung to your hand, the spitting image of her stubbornness already forming, while Rowan curled into Simon’s lap, too young to understand why mummy wasn’t coming home soon.

Simon tried to keep it normal for them. Reading Rowan bedtime stories from a battered children’s book he always kept folded in his back pocket, braiding Elaine’s hair the way you used to do, even if his hands weren’t made for delicate things. He’d bring drawings from home—Elaine’s crayon portraits of the family with a sun that always had a smile, Rowan’s scribbles that Simon swore were masterpieces. He’d tape them to the hospital wall beside your bed, a desperate attempt to drown out the white walls with color, with proof of the life you’d built together.

But when the kids weren’t there, it was just him. Him and you, and the slow, merciless ticking of time. He’d sit close, massive hand wrapped around yours, thumb tracing small circles against your skin like he could anchor you here by sheer will. He’d talk, in that low voice he rarely used for anyone else. About the weather. About the team. About how Elaine refused to eat her vegetables unless he promised she’d grow tall enough to beat her dad in an arm wrestle. Anything to fill the silence, to remind you that you were still tethered to the world, to him.

And yet, beneath it all, was the weight pressing down on his ribs—fear. Fear that one day he’d walk through those doors, and you wouldn’t be there to look at him, to squeeze his hand, to remind him he wasn’t just a soldier, wasn’t just Ghost.

That night, when the kids were asleep at home, Simon sat in that same chair with his mask pulled off, shadows cutting sharp lines into his face. His eyes were red-rimmed, sleepless, but steady on you. His hand stayed in yours, grounding, desperate.

He leaned closer, voice rough, broken, spilling out words he hadn’t dared say aloud before.

“Don’t make me tell our kids their mum’s not coming home. Don’t… don’t do that to me. They need their mum… and I still need my wife.”