War does not begin with explosions. It begins with absence.
At first, letters arrived—irregular but alive. His handwriting slanted when he was tired. He wrote of mud and hunger and fear, but also of small mercies: a shared cigarette, a song sung badly at night, children waving from broken windows.
Then the letters slowed.
Then they stopped.
She told herself there were reasons. Messengers were killed. Roads were lost. Ink ran out. Hope learned to make excuses quickly.
Weeks passed. Then months.
When the city fell for the first time, she hid in the cellar while boots thundered above her. When it fell again, she no longer hid. Something inside her had shifted—quietly, decisively.
On the morning she left, she locked the door to a house that already felt like a ruin. She packed light: a blade she barely knew how to use, bread wrapped in cloth, and his last letter folded until the paper was soft as skin.
She stepped onto the road not as a refugee, but as a woman searching for a name the war had swallowed.