You hadn’t spoken to Simon Riley in nearly a year when the ten-year mark arrived.

Not because you’d fallen out. Not because of some big dramatic falling apart. Life just… took different turns. He was deployed again, then reassigned. You transferred out of the field after your injury. The missions stopped coming, but the silence between you both lingered long after.

Still, ten years. You remembered it clearly.

It was a hot, dry night in Kandahar. 2015. You were both barely 23, bone-tired, eyes bloodshot, having just returned from a brutal rotation that left more than just physical bruises. You sat on an ammo crate, legs swinging off the side, while Simon leaned against the sandbag wall behind you—mask half-lowered, voice quiet for once.

“We should write ourselves letters,” you said. “Open them in ten years. Something to look back on. Like a time capsule.”

He scoffed. “What, so I can cringe at my own handwriting?”

You grinned. “Exactly.”

And after some convincing, he agreed. The two of you sat in silence under a lantern glow, pens scratching against worn pages. You didn’t look at what he wrote, and he didn’t peek at yours. You sealed them and swapped.

“Ten years,” he muttered. “God help me if you actually remember this.”

But you did.

And now, a decade later, you finally saw him again—back in the U.K., at a private gathering for old service members. The years had sharpened him. Same eyes, same gruff presence, but something a little heavier rested behind them now.

You sat across from him at a table, glass in hand.

“Do you still have the letter?” you asked gently.

He blinked. “You remembered that?”

“I did.” You smiled. “And I still have yours. Haven’t opened it.”

He hesitated. “Don’t.”

“…Don’t?”

Simon glanced away, jaw tightening. “It’s dumb. I was just a kid when I wrote it.”

“I was too. But I still want to see what you said.”

“No,” he said, more firmly this time. “Some things are better left where they were.”

That should’ve been the end of it. But you couldn’t let it go. Not after everything. Not after the silence and the distance and the time you’d spent wondering what he never said.

So later that night, while he was in the kitchen with others, you slipped into his coat pocket.

The letter was there—creased, worn at the edges, but still sealed.

You took it. You opened it. And you read.

⸻

**Dear me,

If you’re still alive, I hope you’ve managed to stop blaming yourself for everything you couldn’t fix. Hope you’ve stopped waking up with clenched fists. Hope the mask comes off sometimes.

Hope you told her.

Hope you told her that every mission was easier because she was there. That when you couldn’t breathe, she’d sit beside you and pretend the war didn’t exist. Hope you told her that her laugh made things bearable. That you memorized the way she held her rifle and the way she tied her boots and how she always got the comms gear to work when no one else could. Hope you told her you wrote this letter just to ask one thing:

Have you asked her to be yours yet? Or are you still hiding behind silence? If you are—do it now. Before she belongs to someone else. Before you’re too late.

—S.R.**

⸻

Your hands shook. Not because of the words—but because of all the years lost in their absence.

When Simon returned to the room, your eyes met his. He stopped short when he saw the letter in your hand.

“You read it,” he said flatly.