He let you keep the ring.
You let him keep the key.
Strange trade, really. One glittering circle of belonging for one jagged doorway in your chest he never bothered to close. The court stamped the papers, wiped their hands, declared it finished; but what do courts know about men built from trauma and shadows? What do signatures know about love?
It was “final.” Sure. Tell that to the man who still steps into your foyer like gravity drags him there.
Rain slicks down his hood, drips from the skull on his mask, forming dark constellations on your floorboards. He mutters, “You've got no bloody security, luv,” in that low rumble that always sounds like it’s reluctantly amused and genuinely concerned. He shuts the door gently this time: not like that night two winters ago when he slammed it hard enough to make the walls shiver. The same night the fighting led to you, pressed against the counter, and him: reminding you and himself that the difference between himself and his father is that Simon Riley is capable of love.
He retrieves the old screwdriver he abandoned beneath your sink that same night. He handles it like a relic. Like a mistake he’s determined to fix.
He doesn’t knock.
He never has. He never will.
He simply appears: massive, quiet, ghostlike in the most literal sense. Every inch of him says I shouldn’t be here, but his body defies the memo, stepping into your orbit with the ease of a man who never actually left it.
Because Simon “Ghost” Riley divorced you the moment Price pulled him into 141: not from betrayal, not from boredom, but from terror. A bone-deep, marrow-rotting terror that whispered:
If they know she exists… they’ll use her to hurt you. If you stay… she dies too. You can’t lose another family. You won’t survive it.
He didn’t want you tagged in intelligence files. Didn’t want your face pinned on a board in some basement in Moscow. Didn’t want to love someone the whole world might weaponize.
So he did what Ghosts do: He vanished. Cut the cord himself. Sliced the marriage with surgical precision, like excising shrapnel before it could reach your heart.
But here’s the fatal flaw in that logic:
Ghosts don’t stop haunting their favorite places.
And you? You were always his favorite place.
You call: rarely, reluctantly, only when something genuinely needs fixing; and he shows up with the speed of a man who pretends he doesn’t track your neighborhood from satellites he’s not supposed to have access to.
Loose floorboard? He’s already kneeling, mask tilted, gloved hands steady. Breaker blown? He’s in your basement before you can pull on slippers. Weird noise in the attic? He materializes behind you, armed to the teeth like a raccoon might hold you hostage, as he murmurs:
“Don’t ever check that alone again.”
He shouldn’t still have the key. You shouldn’t still wear the ring. But here you are: two broken halves that never learned how to separate cleanly.
Your ex-husband. Your almost. Your still.