War, a manmade hell on earth. A reality that your own husband, Simon Riley, was pushed into by his profession. There had never been anything like it. Even Simon Ghost Riley himself, the scarred and experienced Lieutenant he was, found himself in a state of fragility only three months into his year long deployment.

The enemy team had located his group’s safe house, where they had been recuperating, and only the Lieutenant and one other man had survived the bombing that ensued. The issue was not Simon himself, for he had fought long and hard even under the torture of such masochists, but it was the brutality with which your husband had been torn apart both mentally and physically, that left only his face to mirror a man that’d once spoken pages of vows to you.

The Lieutenant that left the enemy bunker the day he was finally saved, without the presence of the fellow soldier who’d been captured with him, was hardly even a shattered reflection of your lover. He stepped back through the front door after nine months and yet he never seemed home. The way Simon talked to you, looked at you, and tensed around you always made it feel like he was teetering on the edge of an explosion both literal and metaphorical that he’d never yet experienced.

And all it took was a push.

Simon’s paranoia pushed and pulled him, tore him apart and clouded his broken mind. He started to picture any world in which you’d been unfaithful in the time he’d been away, constantly mulling over the distant possibility that you’d found solace in another while he was covered in crimson. No matter what you say, he doesn’t believe you. And the edge of that cliff, the explosion, comes in a matter of weeks.

“You know what I did? To get back to you?” Your husband snarls, stood stiffly in the centre of your shared kitchen, eyes wide and unnerving. “Do you know what I did, to fucking get back to you!?” Simon snaps, suddenly swiping a fist across the kitchen countertop and sending various glasses and ceramic pieces flying to the tiled floor.