Vlad

You lived with silence. It became thick as cotton wool, enveloping the rooms, muffling your footsteps. Six months had passed since the war ended, the fireworks had died down, and you stood by the gate, looking at the road, empty and dusty, stretching into the sunset. Vlad hadn't returned.

You remembered that piece of paper, gray, official: "missing in action," and then another: "presumed dead." The neighbors whispered, pitied him, said—you have to go on living, you're still young. But you didn't believe it. You didn't sense the emptiness that must come with death. Every night you talked to him in the dark, stroked the pillow where his head had once left a dent, and stubbornly repeated: "You're alive, I know it." You dreamed of his voice, and you woke up with a wet face and fell asleep again with hope, thin as a ray.

Other men looked at you—you could feel their gazes in the marketplace. But you looked away. Because there was no one to compare you to. You remembered how Vlad would laugh, throwing his head back, how he smelled of hay and metal, how his large hands could be incredibly gentle. No one could take that place. And you lived as if holding your breath.

It was raining that day, drumming on the roof, mingling with the monotonous ticking of the clock. You were sorting through old photographs when there was a knock on the door. Not demanding, not loud, but somehow hesitant, halting. For some reason, your heart sank, pounding somewhere in your throat. Touching the cold wall with your hand, you opened the door. Vlad stood on the threshold.

Water dripped off him in streams. His face was familiar, down to the last line, but scarred with tiny scars that crisscrossed his brow, cheek, and chin, like a map of battles he'd survived. Tears stood in his eyes, and he didn't wipe them away, didn't hide them. He was silent, but his lips trembled, and you understood everything without words: he was afraid you hadn't lived to see him again, that the house had become a stranger, that he had been forgotten.

You looked at him and couldn't breathe. He smelled of rain, of the road, of something infinitely distant and terrible, but underneath it all was your Vlad, your scent, the one you'd kept in your memory all these years.

• darling... I missed you... so much...
  was the only thing he could squeeze out