You never thought you’d be the type of person who compared love to ghosts, but that’s what you’d been doing for years. Not the kind of ghosts that haunted the shadows of your bedroom, but the kind that lived in your chest—the memory of someone who once was, and never would be again.

Your ex hadn’t just been your partner; he was the axis of your world. His laugh, his flaws, his warmth, his reckless temper—it had all been yours, and you had loved him with every piece of yourself. But then the world took him. Some random, stupid twist of fate. A car crash. A bullet in the wrong place. A sickness no one saw coming. The details stopped mattering after the funeral, because grief didn’t care about reasons. Grief only cared about wreckage, and it wrecked you completely.

You cursed the world for it. You cursed yourself, too. Why him? Why not you? The unfairness carved deep, jagged scars that you didn’t even try to hide. And when the time finally came where you dared to meet people again, you realized you weren’t searching for love—you were searching for a copy. Someone who spoke like him, someone who carried themselves like him. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it wasn’t, but you chased shadows of a man who could never return.

And then Simon Riley walked into your life.

At first, he was nothing like your ex. A mask where a face should be. A silence where easy words used to live. He carried himself like a soldier who knew too much about death to ever flinch at life. And yet—something about him made the void inside you less unbearable. You hated it at first, the guilt gnawed at you. Was this just another attempt to replace what you lost? To use him as a stand-in for someone he’d never even met?

But Simon wasn’t the kind of man you could project your past onto for long. He made sure of that. He was firm, steady, impossible to mold into anyone else’s image. And when the arguments came—because of course they did—you learned something you didn’t expect. Simon never yelled. He refused to raise his voice, even when you lashed out. Even when grief sharpened your words into knives. He listened. He took responsibility, sometimes even when he shouldn’t have. He didn’t crush you beneath his temper; he gave you space to breathe, to cool, to come back down from the storm.

Your eyes widened at his calm demeanor as you looked at him leaning against the kitchen counter, almost confused, but something else there as well—and that’s when it hit you.

Your ex had loved you, yes—but he would’ve shouted, slammed doors, left you to drown in guilt. Simon didn’t. Simon carried his love differently. Quieter, heavier, but steadier. And in those moments, you realized he wasn’t a replacement. He wasn’t filling someone else’s shoes. He was something else entirely.

An upgrade.

It was a cruel word, maybe, but an honest one. Because Simon didn’t just soothe the ache of your past—he showed you how much more there could be. Little things. The way he watched you like you mattered in ways you never thought you could again. The way his presence made you feel protected without suffocated. The way he gave, not because he had to, but because he chose to. And for the first time, the guilt began to fade, replaced by a terrifying thought: maybe this is why it all happened. Maybe you were meant to walk through that loss, that fire, so you’d know how to recognize him when he finally came along.

Simon’s eyes lingered on you, catching that flicker in your expression—something he hadn’t seen before. His voice came low, gravelly, the words roughened by his accent.

“Y’alright, love?”

Your gaze met his, lungs tightening before you let out a shaky breath and gave the smallest nod.

Simon wasn’t the shadow of someone else. And maybe, just maybe, he was exactly what you had been waiting for all along.