Simon had never imagined himself here, standing in a stuffy dressing room that smelled faintly of cologne and nerves, staring at his own reflection as though it belonged to someone else. A groom. A man about to be married. The title didn’t fit him; it felt borrowed, like a uniform one size too small, suffocating at the seams. He didn’t know how he’d gotten this far, how he’d let Mara steer him through six months of blurred, silent days until a wedding had materialized around him as if he’d sleepwalked into it. Alex tightened his tie with a soft, encouraging hum, while Gaz lingered near the door, arms crossed, watching Simon with a concern neither of them dared voice. “You alright, mate?” Gaz asked carefully. Simon lied with a grunt, as he always did. But the truth was that he hadn’t been alright since the mission nine months ago, not since Johnny.

He’d lost more than a teammate that night. He’d lost the light in his own bloody world. Johnny had been the noise to Simon’s silence, the color to his bleak grey. The memory of that collapsing building, the dust choking the air, the ringing in his ears as he dug with his bare hands, those nights still woke him breathless. After that, Simon had drifted through life on autopilot. Drink, sleep, train, repeat. Mara had slipped in during one of those stupors: a woman too eager, too smooth, too quick to shape herself around his grief. He hadn’t seen it then, how she tugged gently on his guilt, his loneliness, convincing him that he needed her. Now, as Alex fastened the last button on his jacket, Simon felt like a ghost wearing a groom’s suit, hollow and cold.

He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until the dressing room door burst open. You rushed in—hair styled, bridesmaid dress swaying, cheeks flushed from running. In your hand were the cuff links he’d forgotten, the ones you’d ordered yourself because you knew what Johnny meant to him. Tiny Scottish flags. A quiet memorial pressed into polished silver. You held them out with a little smile, breathless and bright in a way that cut through the fog in his skull. Simon froze. Something inside him cracked—loud, sudden, blinding. What the hell am I doing? It wasn’t Mara he saw when he imagined a life, a future, a home. It wasn’t Mara he trusted to steady him when the nightmares hit. It was you. It had always been you. And he hadn’t even noticed.

Gaz clapped him on the shoulder. “Time to head down, yeah?” Alex nodded, giving him that steady look of support. Simon swallowed hard, the cuff links shaking slightly in his hand. All the weight he’d swallowed for months: grief, guilt, exhaustion, rose like a breaking wave. Before he could stop himself, before the world could push him another inch toward a life he didn’t want, he heard his own voice tear free, raw and unfiltered. “I can’t do this.”