On the morning I married my best friend, the American flag over the Ohio courthouse hung limp in the windless heat, and my hands were shaking so hard I could barely sign my name.

The hallway smelled like disinfectant and burnt coffee. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. A security guard watched daytime TV on a tiny screen turned low. Somewhere down the corridor, someone was crying—sharp, ugly sobs that bounced off the marble walls and made the place feel more like a hospital than a temple of law.

This wasn’t supposed to be romantic. It wasn’t supposed to change my life.

It was supposed to be paperwork.

“Breathe, Mia,” Harry murmured, his palm warm against the small of my back as we waited outside Courtroom 3B in downtown Columbus, Ohio. “You look like you’re about to bolt.”

“I’m fine,” I lied, staring at the brass plaque with the judge’s name on it. “Totally calm. Totally normal to marry your best friend on a Tuesday before lunch.”

Harry huffed out a laugh. “In fairness, Subway does have that $5 footlong deal. It’s practically destiny.”

I elbowed him, but I smiled. That was the problem with Harry Brennan. He could make me laugh on days when laughing felt impossible—like the day the doctor said the words that sliced my life cleanly into Before and After.

Systemic lupus erythematosus.

In that cramped exam room with the laminated poster of the human immune system peeling at the corners, the word had sounded like a curse. My immune system wasn’t just overreactive; it was turning traitor, attacking my own organs. The treatments were aggressive, lifelong—and so expensive they made my rent in Columbus look like pocket change.

“Do you have good insurance?” the rheumatologist had asked gently, as if “good” was something people like me ever got.

I’d wanted to laugh then, too.

Good insurance. That was for people with salaried jobs and HR departments, not for freelance graphic designers who lived above a bakery and paid for health care with a patchwork of cheap plans and hope.

I hadn’t laughed when I went home and spread my new reality across my kitchen table: pamphlets, printouts, numbers that didn’t add up no matter how many times I checked them. I’d sat there until midnight, staring at a future where my body would shut down long before my bank account did.

And then there was a knock at my door.

Harry had filled the doorway like he always did—six feet of broad-shouldered, green-eyed comfort in a faded Ohio State hoodie and jeans, his dark hair mussed like he’d been carding his fingers through it on the drive over.

“You look like hell,” he’d announced cheerfully, dropping a greasy paper bag from the taco place down the street onto my table. “And not in a cute, indie-film way.”

“Thanks,” I’d said dryly. “You really know how to make a girl feel special, Brennan.”

He’d pulled out a chair, sat, and then really looked at me. The smile slipped. “Okay. Jokes later. What’s going on, Mia?”

So I had told him. About the lupus. About the meds that cost more per month than I made in two. About the way the doctor had said “organ damage” and “kidneys” and “stroke risk” in the same calm tone people use when ordering a salad. About the number at the bottom of the estimated annual cost sheet that made my vision go white around the edges.

Harry had listened with his elbows on the table, fingers laced, eyes anchored to mine like he was trying to pin me to this Earth with sheer stubbornness.

“When do you start treatment?” he’d asked.

“When I can afford it,” I’d said, trying to sound breezy and not break into a thousand sharp pieces. “So, you know, sometime in 2050.”

He’d been quiet for exactly three seconds.

“Marry me,” he’d said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Marry me,” he repeated, as casually as if he’d suggested we order pizza instead of tacos. “Military spouses get full medical coverage. Tricare. It’s actually good insurance. It’ll cover your meds, your specialists, the whole shebang.”

“Harry, that’s—”

“Brilliant?” he’d supplied. “Sexy? The best terrible idea I’ve ever had?”

“Insane,” I’d finished. “What about when you want to date someone, get married for real? ‘Hi, I come with a lupus wife as a bonus’ is not exactly a selling point.”

He’d shrugged like it was nothing. “I’m deploying in six weeks. I’ll be in Afghanistan for almost a year. We file the marriage license, you get coverage, I head overseas. When I come back, we see where we are. If you’re healthy and set, we get divorced. No hard feelings. You keep your kidneys. I get the peace of mind of knowing you’re not skipping meds because they cost more than a used Honda. Everybody wins.”

“What’s in it for you?” I’d demanded, my throat tight. “And don’t say ‘peace of mind’ like you’re in a recruiting commercial.”

He’d leaned forward, his gaze steady, voice suddenly serious in that way that always made me listen. “What’s in it for me is knowing that when I’m in the middle of a desert on the other side of the world, I don’t have to picture you getting sicker because you can’t afford the treatment. You’ve been dragging my sorry butt through life since we were seven, Mia. Let me carry you for once.”

I’d looked at him—really looked at him. At the boy who’d moved in next door with a chipped front tooth and a bruised heart. The boy who had climbed into a storm drain to rescue a scrawny, soaking-wet kitten because I’d started crying. The teenager who’d sat on my roof eating gas station doughnuts the night my parents announced their divorce. The twenty-something who knew my coffee order, my Netflix password, and the exact way to hug me when I was pretending I didn’t need one.

Marrying him should have felt strange.

It didn’t.

It felt terrifying. And inevitable.

So here we were, under that drooping American flag, waiting to turn a stupidly noble idea into legally binding reality.

A clerk leaned out of the courtroom door. “Harold Brennan and Mia Sullivan?”

Harry squeezed my hand. “Ready, Mrs. Almost-Brennan?”

My heart did a weird little flip at the sound of it. “Nope,” I said honestly. “Let’s go anyway.”

The ceremony was over in six minutes.

I wore my nicest blue dress—the one I’d bought on sale at Target for job interviews. Harry wore his dress uniform, the dark Army green making his eyes look almost unnaturally bright. The judge was a tired woman with soft lines around her mouth and no patience for romance.

“Do you, Harold James Brennan, take Mia Catherine Sullivan to be your lawfully wedded wife?” she intoned.

“I do,” Harry said. No hesitation. No joke.

“Do you, Mia Catherine Sullivan, take Harold James Brennan to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

My mouth was dry. I looked at Harry. He gave me a tiny nod, like, You’ve got this. Like he had when I learned to ride a bike, drive a stick shift, parallel park.

“I do,” I managed.

“By the power vested in me by the state of Ohio, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

We both froze.

In twenty years of friendship, we had never crossed that line. Not once. No drunk almost-kisses. No “what if” moments. Harry had always been my safe place, not my crush. My person, not my fantasy.

He leaned in slowly, giving me time to pull away.

I didn’t.

The kiss was soft. Brief. His lips were warm, careful, tasting faintly of the coffee we’d grabbed from the courthouse vending machine. It wasn’t fireworks, but it wasn’t nothing. There was a gentle reverence there that made my knees a little less trustworthy than usual.

When we pulled apart, he smiled. “Well, Mrs. Brennan. How does it feel to be an upstanding married woman of the great state of Ohio?”

“Weird,” I said. But I was smiling, too. “Really, really weird.”

We celebrated our “wedding” at the greasy spoon diner off High Street, the one with the cracked red vinyl booths and a signed photo of some local Ohio State legend on the wall. We split a grilled cheese and fries like we had in high school. Harry insisted on feeding me a bite of pie “for the wedding album.” I threw a sugar packet at his head.

For two hours, it almost felt like we’d pulled off a heist on the American healthcare system and gotten away with it.

Then the next morning, I stood with my fingers wrapped around the cool metal rail at John Glenn Columbus International Airport and watched my husband walk toward TSA.

“You sure you don’t want an airport pretzel as a last meal?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

He adjusted the strap of his duffel. “If today is my last day on earth, I refuse to spend it eating anything that comes from a glass case.”

“Says the man who lived off gas station burritos at nineteen.”

“Growth,” he said solemnly. Then his expression softened. “Hey.”

I looked up. “Yeah?”

He cupped my cheek with his palm. It was such a small thing, but my breath caught anyway. “Promise me you’ll start treatment right away. No delaying. No tough-it-out crap. I didn’t just get hitched in a courthouse that smells like Clorox for you to play chicken with your immune system.”

“Bossy,” I muttered. “But fine. I promise.”

“Good.” He dipped his head, kissed my forehead—another first—and the warmth of his mouth there lingered long after he stepped back. “See you in a year, Mrs. Brennan.”

“Stay safe, Sergeant Brennan,” I said, fighting back the burn of tears. “Come home in one piece. Preferably all the original pieces.”

He grinned. “I make no promises about scars. Chicks dig scars.”

“I have lupus. I dig naps.”

He laughed, shook his head, and then he was walking away, his uniform blending into the river of passengers. I watched until he disappeared around the corner. My chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with disease.

For the first time, the words fake marriage didn’t feel like the whole truth.

Not anymore.

The first envelope from Afghanistan arrived three weeks later, thin and crumpled, with an APO address and my married name written in Harry’s messy scrawl.

I held it in my hands for a long moment, sitting at the rickety kitchen table of my studio above the bakery, listening to the distant rumble of trucks on the street and the hiss of the espresso machine downstairs. Then I slit it open with trembling fingers.

Mia,

Well, I made it. One piece, zero bullet holes, luggage questionable. The Army apparently believes I only need two socks and a Bible for the next year. Good thing I packed extra socks in my carry-on.

The base looks like someone dropped a Walmart parking lot in the middle of the mountains and called it patriotism. There’s dust in places I didn’t know dust could go. The coffee tastes like sadness. The cafeteria claims the meatloaf is beef; I have my doubts.

But it’s…beautiful, too. Don’t tell anyone I said that or I’ll lose my macho points, but the sunsets here? Unreal. The sky turns this wild Ohio-State-buckeye orange and then slides into purple like some over-the-top Instagram filter. If I squint and ignore the barbed wire and the fact that half the people around me are armed, it almost looks peaceful.

How are you? Did you start treatment? Please tell me you started treatment. I can’t exactly come drag you to the doctor from 7,000 miles away, but don’t think that’s going to stop me from nagging you in writing.

It’s weird, calling you my wife. The guys keep asking about you, and I have to show them that old senior photo I had in my wallet. You know, the one where you’re laughing at something I said and trying to pretend you’re not. Now your face is taped to the wall above my bunk like some creepy shrine to my own better judgment.

Write me back. Tell me everything. Tell me what Columbus smells like in the spring and whether they’ve finally fixed that pothole on High Street that eats Toyotas whole. Tell me if the bakery downstairs is still burning the croissants. I need a reminder that the world hasn’t shrunk to sand, sweat, and the taste of powdered eggs.

Your friend (and apparently husband),
Harry

P.S. Don’t get any ideas. I still get to pick the Netflix show when I get home. Marriage hasn’t changed that.

By the time I finished that letter, my cheeks were wet.

I wrote back that night, the words pouring out of me as easily as they had when we used to pass notes in middle school.

Harry,

The bakery downstairs is still burning the croissants. Columbus smells like exhaust, coffee, and rain. Yes, I started treatment. Yes, it sucks. Yes, I hate needles. No, you can’t yell at me about it, because I’m actually doing what you asked for once.

The meds are already helping. I’m less exhausted. My joints don’t feel like they’re filled with gravel. I still have lupus, but now I have a fighting chance.

Your insurance did that. You did that. So, for the record: thank you. You don’t like when I say that, but I’m saying it anyway.

Your bunk looks like a prison cell with personality. I can’t believe you put my senior picture up there. I looked at it again after I got your letter. My hair was terrible. This marriage is invalid on those grounds alone.

You want details about home? Fine. The pothole on High Street is still there and now it has a cousin. The kids upstairs adopted a golden retriever puppy who hates thunderstorms and loves barking at 2 a.m. I am learning to love earplugs.

I miss you. There, I said it. The apartment is too quiet without you showing up unannounced to eat my leftovers and judge my taste in reality TV.

Come home safe, okay?

Your friend (and totally legitimate wife),
Mia

P.S. When you get back, I demand veto power over at least half of our Netflix options. This is a democracy.

The letters became our rhythm.

The more he wrote, the more the war seeped into the spaces between his jokes. He never described the worst of it—no gory details, no specifics that could make it past censors—but sometimes a sentence would land heavy on the page.

We took fire today.
Lost a guy I liked.
I’m fine, but I’m tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

In return, I filled my pages with the small, ordinary things he said he missed: the sound of rain on the roof of our old elementary school, the taste of real coffee from the shop near Ohio State’s campus, the way the leaves turned fire-red on our street in October.

And somewhere in those months, the tone shifted.

It didn’t happen in one grand confession. It was in the way his “Take care of yourself” turned into “I need you to be okay.” In the way my “I miss you” stretched into paragraphs about the empty chair at my table, the way I still made enough coffee for two without thinking.

Then, one sweltering August afternoon, a thick envelope landed in my mailbox with his handwriting slanting across the front like he’d been in a hurry.

Mia,

We had a close call yesterday. I can’t tell you exactly what happened—classification and all that—but I keep replaying it in my head like one of those old war movies your dad used to binge on Thanksgiving.

All I could think was, I haven’t told her.

I haven’t told you that I think the stupidest, luckiest thing I ever did was ask you to marry me “for the insurance.” That I fall asleep reading your letters and wake up reaching for another one like some kind of addict. That when everything is loud and chaotic and terrifying, I hear your voice in my head and somehow I can breathe again.

I know this started as paperwork. I know I’m supposed to be the chill best friend who doesn’t make things weird. But maybe the desert baked my brain, or maybe getting close to not getting another shot at this shook something loose.

I’m in love with you, Mia.

Not just the “you’re my person, I’d help you bury a body” kind of love. (Though, for the record, that still stands.) I mean the kind where I picture you when someone says future. The kind where the idea of you marrying anyone else someday makes me want to punch something and that is not a mature emotional response.

I love that you call me on my crap, that you refuse to let me sink when things get bad. I love your stupid cat pajamas and the way you snort when you’re laughing too hard. I love that you didn’t flinch when I said “Afghanistan,” even though I know you were terrified.

I don’t expect you to feel the same way. I don’t want you to feel obligated because we share a last name on a piece of paper. But I needed to say it at least once in my life. If something happens to me out here, I need you to know that somewhere between the courthouse and this godforsaken desert, my fake marriage stopped being fake.

I’m in love with my wife.

There. I said it.

If this freaks you out, pretend I had heatstroke.

Always,
Harry

I read that letter until the paper went soft at the creases. I fell asleep with it pressed under my pillow like a talisman. I woke up and wrote back with shaking hands.

Harry,

Heatstroke, my ass.

You giant idiot.

I’m in love with you, too.

I don’t know when it happened. Maybe it was at the courthouse when you said “I do” like you meant it. Maybe it was every time another envelope showed up and my heart did that stupid flip just seeing your handwriting. Maybe it was the night you described the sunset over those mountains and said you wished I could see it because “you always liked the sky more than the ground.”

All I know is I can’t say the word future without seeing you in it. And it terrifies me and thrills me in equal measure.

We’ve always been a we, you and I. Same street, same school, same cheap diner. Now I can’t stop thinking about a different kind of we. The kind with a shared apartment, shared bed, shared everything. The kind with you coming home from drill and dropping your boots in the hallway and me yelling about it and secretly loving that you’re there to make a mess.

I want all of it with you.

Come home, Harry. Not just to Ohio. To me.

Love,
Your wife (for real this time),
Mia

After that, the letters burned.

We still joked, still traded small details of our days, but now the space between sentences crackled with something new. He described the ring he wanted to buy me when he came home—a vintage setting he’d seen once in a tiny antique shop outside Dayton, with a modest diamond and two small sapphires.

“I know we’re already married,” he wrote, “but I want to do it right. I want to get down on one knee in some completely cliché American restaurant with bad lighting, and I want to ask you to marry me knowing you can say no. I want to hear you say yes when I can see your face and not just your handwriting.”

I wrote about the house I’d seen online—a little white Craftsman with a sagging porch and a maple tree in the yard in a neighborhood near campus. About the way I’d started looking at furniture on Facebook Marketplace like some kind of deranged optimist.

We were planning a life.

On a Tuesday in February, my phone rang while I was matching fonts for a logo on my laptop. The number was from Washington, D.C.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mrs. Mia Brennan?” The voice was deep, careful, threaded with something that made my stomach drop.

“Yes,” I said, my heart stuttering. “This is she.”

“This is Captain Rodriguez calling from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. I’m calling about your husband, Sergeant Harold Brennan. He was injured in an IED explosion three days ago. He’s being transferred stateside for treatment. He is alive and in stable condition, but he’s suffered a moderate traumatic brain injury.”

I gripped the edge of my kitchen counter until my knuckles turned white. “Is he—can I—?”

“You’re listed as his primary next of kin,” the captain said gently. “If you can get to Bethesda, Maryland, you can see him when he arrives tomorrow.”

The next eighteen hours blurred into motion: online tickets to Reagan National, a frantic call to my rheumatologist to clear travel, my neighbor promising to feed my plants. I stuffed Harry’s letters into a worn shoebox and jammed it into my carry-on like a piece of my own heart.

Walter Reed was all white walls, polished floors, and hushed voices, with American flags and framed photos of presidents shaking soldiers’ hands—a uniquely American blend of patriotism and antiseptic.

A nurse with kind eyes led me down a corridor that smelled like hand sanitizer and stale coffee. “He’s awake,” she said. “A little disoriented, but alert. He’s been asking about you.”

About me. His wife. His friend. His something more.

I stood outside his room for a full minute, my palm pressed flat to the cool surface of the door, before I pushed it open.

Harry sat propped up in bed, his left arm in a sling, his head wrapped in clean white bandages. Bruises bloomed along his cheekbone in ugly shades of purple and yellow. There were tubes and monitors, a steady beep-beep-beep marking the rhythm of his heart.

When he saw me, he smiled.

“Mia,” he said, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Hey. You came.”

My throat closed. “Of course I came,” I managed, stepping to his bedside. “How do you feel?”

“Like I got hit by a truck that then backed up to apologize and ran me over again,” he said wryly. “But they say I’m pretty lucky.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “Me too.”

He studied my face for a moment, eyes crinkling at the corners. “The doctor said my wife was coming,” he said, a little frown furrowing his brow. “I thought they had the wrong guy for a second. Then I remembered. Our little courthouse caper.”

“Right,” I said, relief loosening my shoulders. “The fake marriage.”

He nodded. “Best stupid idea I ever had.”

I smiled, waiting—waiting for some flicker of recognition, some shared secret behind his eyes. The letters. The confessions. The ring. The house.

“Harry,” I said carefully. “What’s the last thing you remember? Before…this?”

He shifted against the pillows, face scrunching in concentration. The monitor beeped steadily on. “Landing in Kandahar. Bus ride to the forward operating base. Writing you a letter about the terrible food and my terrible bunk.” He smiled faintly. “Did I send that? I can’t remember.”

My blood went ice-cold.

“Anything after that?” I whispered.

He stared at the ceiling. Seconds ticked by. “Just bits,” he said finally. “Noise. Heat. Then waking up in Germany. And then here. Did something—” He glanced at me, and his expression softened into concern. “Hey. Don’t cry. I’m okay, Mrs. B. I’ve got a few dents in the armor, that’s all.”

He didn’t remember. The eleven months of letters. The moment he’d written I’m in love with you. The future we’d built in ink and paper.

To him, I was still just Mia. His childhood best friend. His fake wife.

Not the woman he’d promised a real proposal to.

I swallowed the sob clawing its way up my throat. “I’m just glad you’re alive,” I said, and it was the truth.

Over the next week, I lived in a cheap extended-stay hotel in Bethesda and spent my days in Harry’s hospital room. I learned to disconnect a tangle of tubes to help him shuffle to the bathroom. I watched physical therapists coax his body back into movements it had once done without thought. I memorized the way his face pinched when the headaches came.

He asked about home in Ohio, about his mom, his sister, the weather. He joked with nurses. He apologized for “putting me through this fake-wife nonsense.”

He never mentioned the letters.

One evening, as the winter light faded outside the window and the TV played some forgettable sitcom on mute, he turned to me.

“So,” he said, “does our sham marriage complicate your love life? You seeing anyone?”

Seeing anyone. I almost laughed.

“You mean besides my husband?” I said lightly.

He rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. Clearly you didn’t marry me for my sparkling personality, so I assume there’s an actual boyfriend somewhere in this picture we need to worry about when I get back to Columbus.”

“There’s no boyfriend,” I said. “Just my cat and my lupus. Very romantic ménage à trois.”

He sobered. “How are you? Really? Are the treatments working?”

“Yes,” I said. “They’re…they’re working.” And they were. My labs looked better than they had in years. I had more good days than bad ones. The irony that a fake marriage had bought me real health while the real love that had bloomed from it had been erased was not lost on me.

“Good,” he murmured. “That’s all I wanted.”

The night I flew back to Ohio, I took the shoebox of letters out of my carry-on and spread them across my bed like fallen leaves. His first awkward jokes. The slow shift into vulnerability. The letter where he’d first written the word love. The one where he’d described the ring.

I read them all. Then I put them back in the box.

When Harry was discharged two weeks later and sent back to Ohio for outpatient rehab, we tried to slip into something like before. I drove him to appointments at the VA hospital on the outskirts of Columbus. We watched football. We ate takeout from our usual diner.

But there was a third presence in every room: the eleven-month version of us that had existed only in letters. The ghost of a love Harry no longer remembered and I couldn’t forget.

The breaking point came on a rainy Sunday afternoon in April.

We were on his couch, a pizza box open on the coffee table, Netflix asking if we were still watching. Harry’s phone buzzed.

He glanced at the screen and smiled. “Huh. It’s Marjorie.”

The name landed like a stone in my stomach. His pre-deployment girlfriend. The one he’d described in his first letter as “a disaster but good for my ego.”

“She heard I’m back,” he said, thumbs moving. “Wants to grab coffee sometime, catch up.”

“That’s nice,” I said, pretending my heart wasn’t lurching around my ribs. “You going to go?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe? I mean, it might be good to…you know. Start dating again. Get back to normal life.” He looked at me, open and earnest. “What do you think?”

What did I think?

I thought about the letter where he’d written that the idea of me marrying someone else made him want to punch a wall. I thought about the house in Columbus we’d picked out together online. The unborn children we’d named in hypothetical conversations.

I thought about how he was asking his wife for advice about how to date someone else.

“I think you should do whatever makes you happy,” I said, and my voice didn’t break. “If coffee with Marjorie feels right, you should go.”

“You’re probably right.” He grinned, looking down at his phone. “Life’s short, huh? Might as well see what’s out there.”

I excused myself, walked into his bathroom, locked the door, sat on the edge of his tub, and pressed my fist against my mouth to keep from making any sound.

It hit me, then, with brutal clarity: the man who had promised me a future in those letters was gone. In his place was a man I knew and loved, but who only remembered the version of us that stopped at “best friends.”

You can’t make someone remember.
You can’t sue fate for breach of contract.

The next morning, I went back to my own apartment and pulled the shoebox from the closet shelf.

I was still kneeling on the floor, letters fanned out around me, when there was a knock at my door.

“Come in,” I called automatically, swiping at my eyes.

The door creaked open. “Your neighbor let me in,” Harry’s voice said. “She threatened to kill me if I made you cry. Again.”

I scrambled to my feet. “Harry. What are you—”

He stepped inside, then stopped dead when he saw the bed.

“My letters,” he breathed.

He crossed to the mattress like he was approaching an altar. Picked up the top page. His own handwriting stared back at him. His gaze flicked to the shoebox label, where I’d written HARRY – AFGHANISTAN in black Sharpie.

“I remember writing this one,” he murmured, touching the ink like it might vanish. “The one about the sunsets.”

He set it down and picked up another. Then another. Pages rustled. The room filled with the ghost-sounds of our year apart.

I watched his face as he read—a flicker of amusement here, a crease between his brows there, a muscle jumping in his jaw. Hope coiled in my chest like something dangerous. Maybe this would spark something. Maybe he’d look up with recognition blazing in his eyes and say, “I remember.”

After a long time, he set the last letter down.

“I wrote all of this,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you wrote back,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I did.”

He took a breath that sounded like it hurt. “I fell in love with you in these letters.”

My throat closed. “Yes.”

He looked at me then, really looked. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice broke. “I’m so damn sorry, Mia, but I don’t remember any of it.”

There it was. The worst truth said out loud.

I sank onto the edge of the bed. “I know.”

“It’s like reading about a movie version of myself,” he said, pacing now, running his hand through his hair. “I see my handwriting. I remember some of the things I describe. The base. The guys. The sunsets. But the feelings—” He shook his head. “I believe the man in those letters loved you. I just don’t remember how it feels to be him.”

The tears came hot and fast. “I’ve been trying,” I said, the words tumbling out. “To be patient. To not push. To not shove this entire year in your face and scream, ‘Look, you loved me.’” I laughed, sharp and humorless. “Some days I feel like a con artist. Like I stole another woman’s husband and put him in my friend’s body.”

He winced. “Mia—”

“I know it’s not your fault,” I said. “I know that. I’d rather have you alive and forgetful than not have you at all. But I don’t know how to love you like this without breaking.”

Silence stretched between us, heavy as wet wool.

Then Harry sat down beside me. Not too close. Close enough that our shoulders brushed.

“What if,” he said slowly, “we don’t try to get back what I lost?”

I frowned, turning to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“What if we accept that the man who wrote those letters is…gone,” he said carefully. “That version of me existed. He loved you. You loved him. That matters. But I’m not him anymore. The blast took more than my memories; it shook something loose in my head. The doctors say I’ll never be exactly who I was before Afghanistan.”

My chest ached. “So that’s it? We just…pretend it never happened?”

“No,” he said. His hand found mine, fingers sliding between mine with the same easy familiarity they’d always had. “We don’t pretend. We honor it. But we don’t live chained to it either.”

He took a breath. “I don’t remember falling in love with you in those letters, Mia. But I know this: when I woke up in that hospital bed in D.C. and saw you standing in the doorway, something in my chest settled. Like, okay. There you are. My person. I’ve felt that every day since.”

I stared at him.

“I think about texting you when something funny happens,” he continued. “The apartment feels wrong if you haven’t been in it for a day. When I thought about grabbing coffee with Marjorie, I kept imagining you rolling your eyes at me and it made me feel…disloyal. Which is insane, because as far as my conscious memory is concerned, we’re just two idiots who scammed the Army for health care.”

A wet laugh escaped me. “Very patriotic of us.”

“I guess what I’m trying to say,” he went on, “is that maybe I’m falling for you anyway. Again. From here. From who we are now.”

My heart stuttered. “Harry…”

He held up a hand. “I’m not making grand declarations. I can’t promise that in three months I’ll be the guy who described your laugh like a religious experience in that one letter—”

“That’s really in there?” I interrupted, incredulous.

He grimaced. “Unfortunately, yes. Sand and sentimentality, lethal combination. My point is, I don’t want you to wait around for me to become someone you already lost. I’m asking if you’ll give this version of me—post-blast, memory-sieve, work-in-progress—a chance. A real chance. Not as your best friend doing you a favor. As a guy taking you on a date. As your husband, if you’ll let him try to earn that role for real.”

It was the most terrifyingly honest thing he’d ever said to me.

“It’s humiliating, isn’t it?” I said, my voice unsteady. “To have to ask, ‘Can we try to make me fall in love with you again?’ Like it’s a chore on a to-do list.”

He winced. “I know how it sounds. And if your answer is ‘Absolutely not, go date Marjorie,’ I’ll—”

“Yes,” I said.

He blinked. “Yes…what?”

“Yes, Harry Brennan,” I said, wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand, laughing through the tears. “I’ll go on a date with my amnesiac husband.”

The grin that broke across his face was so bright it hurt to look at. “Okay,” he said, exhaling a shaky breath. “Okay. Good. Great.”

“Ground rules,” I said, because if I didn’t put some structure around this, I was going to come apart. “We don’t compare everything to the letters. We don’t make this some kind of quest to recreate what we had. We see who we are now. If you fall in love with me again, great. If you don’t, I’ll…deal.”

He sobered. “I don’t want to hurt you more.”

“You can’t keep yourself from hurting me by staying away,” I said softly. “We’re already in it, Harry. Might as well at least enjoy the coffee.”

Our first date was at the High Street diner, under the same faded Ohio State poster, in the same cracked booth where we’d shared apple pie the day of our courthouse wedding.

“You realize this is wildly romantic,” I said, stirring sugar into my coffee. “Bringing your wife to the place you brought your wife the first time you accidentally married her.”

“I’m a simple man,” he said. “Strong coffee, cheap pie, complicated women.”

He asked me questions he already knew the answers to on paper but not in this new life: why I chose graphic design, when I first suspected something was wrong with my health, what my favorite place in the whole United States was. (Answer: the field behind our middle school during the Fourth of July fireworks, lying on our backs on a blanket, watching the sky explode over Columbus.)

He told me about the gaps in his mind. The bits that came back in flashes: the smell of diesel in Kandahar, the way one of his buddies laughed, the sound of a mortar siren at three in the morning. Sometimes he’d get a migraine and see brief “memory clips”—a fragment of a sentence, my handwriting on a page, the curve of my smile in a picture.

“It’s like trying to watch a movie through a keyhole,” he said. “You know there’s a whole story, but you only get random frames.”

We took it slow.

We went to the OSU campus and heckled undergrads who wore shorts in January. We drove out to Hocking Hills on a crisp fall day and walked the trails, his pace measured to match mine because lupus knees and TBI headaches are terrible hiking companions.

One evening in October, standing in the parking lot of a Kroger, juggling a gallon of milk and a bag of cat food, he looked at me and said, very quietly, “I think I’m in love with you.”

“Think?” I teased, because I needed the lightness to keep from dissolving.

He set the milk in the trunk, then cupped my face in both hands. “No,” he said. “I know.”

When he kissed me, it wasn’t cautious or polite. It was sure. Hungry. Like he’d finally caught up to something his heart had known before his mind did.

Six months later, in my tiny kitchen with the Ohio evening light turning the walls gold, he got down on one knee.

He didn’t have the antique ring from the letter. He had a new one: a simple white-gold band with three small diamonds that caught the light like tiny stars.

“I know we’re already married,” he said, voice rough. “On paper. In a courthouse that smelled like chemicals. But I want to do this right. As the man I am now. Mia Catherine Sullivan-Brennan, will you marry me? Not for Tricare. Not for forms. For real. Fake divorce, real engagement, real wedding, the whole ridiculously American charade.”

I laughed through my tears. “You really know how to sell it, Brennan.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s always been yes.”

We filed for divorce in the same courthouse where we’d married, a bored clerk stamping our papers like she was approving a parking permit. We walked out single, went to the diner, split a slice of pie, and toasted to our “upcoming remarriage.”

Four months later, in a small white church on the outskirts of Columbus, under stained glass windows and a cross that had watched over decades of Midwestern vows, we said “I do” again.

This time there were flowers. My dress was white and real and mine. His uniform fit a little differently, broader in the shoulders, a scar peeking from his hairline. His mother cried. My father walked me down the aisle. My rheumatologist sat quietly in the back row, because without her, I might not have been able to stand for thirty minutes straight.

When the pastor said, “You may kiss the bride,” Harry kissed me like he meant every word of every letter he didn’t remember writing.

At our reception in a rented hall strung with white lights and Ohio State banners (his idea, not mine), his best friend from the Army gave a speech.

“These two have been through more in a couple of years than most people ever will,” Mike said, raising his glass. “They’ve survived war, illness, amnesia, and American bureaucracy. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”

That night, when the guests had gone and we were alone in the little bungalow we’d bought on a quiet street in Columbus, Harry pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“I have something for you,” he said.

Inside was a sheet of paper, worn and soft.

Dear future Mia,

It’s the night before I deploy. You’re asleep on your couch with some terrible reality show playing in the background, and I’m sitting on your floor, staring at the TV and trying not to freak out.

I don’t know what the next year is going to look like. I don’t know if I’ll come back in one piece, or if I’ll come back at all. But I know this: marrying you, even in a courthouse under fluorescent lights with a cranky judge and no flowers, felt like the most right thing I’ve ever done.

I told you this is for the insurance. That’s not a total lie. I want you healthy. I want you alive and bossing me around well into our eighties.

But if I’m being honest—really, brutally honest—I hope that when I come home, we’re not just friends who share a last name to scam the system. I hope I’m brave enough to tell you that somewhere in the last twenty years of you being my best friend, I fell in love with you.

If I don’t remember to say it later, if something happens to my coward brain or my idiot mouth, I want you to have proof that even Before Afghanistan Me knew.

You’re it for me, Mia.

See you on the other side.

Your favorite fake husband,
Harry

I swallowed hard. “You wrote this before you left.”

He nodded. “Found it in an old journal a few months ago. Guess I chickened out about sending it. Or maybe I figured I’d have time to say it in person.”

“The blast didn’t take your love for me,” I said, voice trembling. “Just the memory of when you finally said it.”

He brushed his thumb over my cheek, wiping away a tear. “Then I’ll just have to keep saying it,” he murmured. “Every day. Until we’re old and weird and yelling at kids to get off our lawn.”

We built a life.

We had two daughters who inherited Harry’s green eyes and my tendency to talk too much. My lupus had flares and remissions, bad days and good ones, but I had meds, doctors, Harry. On the worst days, when my joints burned and exhaustion pinned me to the couch, he’d sit beside me and read from the shoebox of letters, his own words echoing from a time he couldn’t touch but could still honor.

Every year on our anniversary, I’d choose one letter from the box and read it aloud. He’d listen like he was hearing it for the first time—because he was—and then he’d tell me something new he loved about the life we’d built since.

“Love isn’t just what we wrote back then,” he said once, when our youngest had finally fallen asleep after a day of Ohio summer chaos. “It’s this. The grocery lists. The arguments over paint colors. The way you hog the covers.”

“And the way you snore,” I added.

“Fake news. I breathe passionately.”

We grew older. The scars on his head faded to pale lines. My medication list lengthened. The shoebox of letters became a relic our kids knew not to touch without reverence.

Harry never got his memories back.

But he didn’t need to.

Love, I’d learned, isn’t always about what you can remember. Sometimes it’s about what you choose, over and over, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday in Columbus, Ohio, with the American flag flapping outside your bungalow and the smell of someone grilling in the yard next door.

We chose each other.

Once on paper, under fluorescent lights and a limp flag.

Once in ink, across oceans and deserts.

And then, more importantly, every single day after that—no paperwork, no promises to game the system, just two people who had been broken in different ways deciding that beginning again was worth the risk.

Our love story was never neat. It was messy and inconvenient and profoundly human.

It was also, in every version, ours.