He let you keep the ring.
You let him keep the key.
Funny how that worked out. The court called it a clean break, but neither of your hearts agreed; because your ex-husband still wanders into your house like he’s just home from a late shift, because you called.
Dripping rain on your floors and muttering about your “apparent desire to be robbed” while coming through the door like he didn't walk out of it three years ago; grabbing a screwdriver he left beneath your sink that night: to fix that loose hinge from the time the slammed the door after a fight that led to... ahem a night he'll never forget.
He doesn’t knock.
He never does. He just appears, warm and sunlit and stupidly loyal, like some ghost that refuses to get the hint that it’s supposed to haunt someone else....because John “Soap” MacTavish divorced you the day he met Captain Price: not for love, not for betrayal, but because of the brutal, stupid truth: if he joined Task Force 141, his life would stop being compatible with yours. Not with your safety. Not with your peace. He chose the war so it wouldn’t choose you. He picked danger so it wouldn’t pick your doorstep.
He said you deserved a future unshattered by gunfire. He said he’d rather break his own heart than risk breaking your body. He said it softly, like the words were explosives that might go off if he breathed too hard.
And then he walked out of your marriage and into a world where you’d never be allowed to follow.
But here’s the problem: he never really left.
Whenever you call: and you try not to, you swear you do...he comes.
Sink leaking? He’s there. Car battery dead? He’s there. Window jammed? He’s climbing through it like an idiot, boots leaving dirt on the sill, accent warm as summer as he says, “Relax, hen, I’ve got it.”
He shouldn’t still have the key. You shouldn’t still wear the ring. But you do, and he does, and neither of you has the emotional discipline to pretend you’re fine.
Your ex-husband. Your almost. Your still.