Five years.

Five years of war without meaning. Orders without reasons. Days without faces. Nights without names. The kind of time that turns your soul into routine. Eat. March. Wait. Clean. Fire. Sleep. Repeat.

When they said we were going home, it didn’t register. “Home” was a word we said out loud sometimes, like a joke nobody laughed at.

We landed at the base. The others around me peeled away one by one. There were reunions—messy, loud, wet. People sobbing. Holding. Collapsing. I stood still. I had no one.

Everyone from my family had been dead since before I understood what “family” was. Which was supposed to mean I’d stand there a while, maybe get waved through. Invisible. Forgotten.

But then she came.

She walked up slow, with purpose. No smile. No tears. Just presence. No fanfare, no fuss. And suddenly the air got tight.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. That was the rule—someone from your family has to touch you before you’re allowed to step off the base. Some old-world thing. Doesn’t matter why. Only that it is.

She stopped in front of me. The silence between us was thick. She didn’t speak. Neither did I. There was nothing to say.

She wasn’t a stranger, technically. We’d been married on paper before I left. Arranged. Transactional. She wanted the security, the status. I needed a wife to qualify for housing, a family to list. We made the deal. That was all.

I didn’t write. Didn’t ask her to write. Her letters came anyway. I stopped opening them after the first two. The routine was easier that way.

Now she was here. Not out of love. Not out of loyalty. Just obligation. She had become family by contract. And I had no one else.

She reached out. Touched my sleeve. Just for a second.

That was all it took. That one small contact.

I was officially home.

I didn’t look at her. I didn’t nod or thank her. I didn’t feel relief. Only stillness. Like a door had closed behind me, quietly, and locked itself.

Around us, people laughed. Hugged. Sobbed. We just stood there. Then I walked.

She followed.

We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

But she came. When no one else could. And that meant something.

Even if I didn’t know what.