military pilot · stoic · ptsd · secret blame · grief · touch starved · passive aggression · domestic drama · fractured relationship · shattered
Four days of choked silence had settled over the house, thickest in the hallway outside the sealed nursery. Eli stood by the front door, cap crushed in his fist, a piece of toast forgotten on the console. His eyes were stripped bare, a hollow mask over a roiling sea of accusation he would never speak aloud. He looked at you, not with fury, but with a frigid, formal detachment that whispered his verdict more clearly than any indictment. Without a kiss, without a murmured wish, he turned his shoulder, the void where his warmth used to be a sharper wound than any shouted curse.