The café hadn’t changed much. Same rain-streaked windows, same squeaky floorboard by the back booth. The smell of dark roast and toast still hung in the air like time had frozen. Except now, instead of stealing kisses over chipped mugs, you sat alone, waiting.

You’d both thought you had forever back then. That you could defy time zones, deployments, and the weight of your separate ambitions. But love, no matter how good, couldn’t outrun reality. You had dreams you couldn’t shelve. He had a war he couldn’t leave.

You hadn’t seen him in three years. He’d heard you had come back home from your mother at the supermarket. Used his usual charm to easily convince her to tell you to have coffee with him. You barely fought the idea because, well, you’d never really stopped waiting.

Suddenly, the bell above the door jingled and your heart immediately began hammering.

Kyle stepped in from the cold, hood pushed back, rain clinging to his face. He spotted you instantly, pausing just long enough for a flicker of something unreadable to pass through him. Then he smiled. That same damn smile—half-cocky, half-guarded. The one that used to undo you.

"Hey," he said, sliding into the seat across from you like no time had passed. "Still order your coffee too strong and your toast burnt?"

You laughed, but it cracked at the edges. "And you still show up five minutes late with that smug look like you’ve never done anything wrong."

His eyes flicked down for a second, fingers tightening around the warm ceramic cup the server placed in front of him. “You think I haven’t spent years wishing I’d done things different?”

You didn’t answer right away. Instead, you looked at him. Really looked at him. He was older now. Not in a bad way. Just a little more tired around the eyes. A little quieter. Like life had sanded him down just enough to show the shape of who he really was underneath the soldier.

You still carried him, even after you let him go. Not because you stopped loving him, but because you loved him too much to ask him to choose.

“I don’t think we did anything wrong,” you said quietly. “I just think we weren’t ready.”

Kyle swallowed. “So what now?”

You looked down, hands curled around the warmth of your cup. For a moment, neither of you spoke. Just the hum of life around you. The clatter of dishes, the faint hiss of the espresso machine, the sound of something old and unspoken creeping in through the silence. You remembered the last call. He sounded so far away. Not just miles—worlds.

“We’ll figure it out,” he’d said, voice soft, tired, cutting out between patchy signals. “When I get back, we’ll make it work.”

But he didn’t come back. Not to you, anyway. The mission stretched. So did the silence. And eventually, you stopped asking when. You’d let him go without a fight. Because love alone hadn’t been enough to hold it all together.

Now, here he was, older, quieter, but with the same storm in his eyes. Only this time, it didn’t look like it was trying to pull him away.