Sweet Romance15 min read
Wontons, Quiet Battles, and a Promise in the Cold
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I wake up to a pain I know too intimately and yet never lived to remember. "Ah—this hurts," I say, and the world smells like antiseptic and iron and the thin sweet of sleeping medicine.
"You're back," someone says. A man towers at the doorway like a dark cliff against the pale winter light. He looks old to me, like someone who has lived with too many things he doesn't say. Up close, his face is not cruel. It is precise, like a tool kept clean. He is River Farley.
"I… am I dead?" I whisper. My voice is small, stupid. "Did I—"
River doesn't answer with what I expect. He crosses the room in two steps, snatches the paper from the bedside table—an official paper with heavy black ink that means ending things—and drops it, single-handed, into the ward trash can.
"You can sign it," he says, voice low and rough. "But if you're thinking of ending the child, I'll take you to the hospital tomorrow."
I taste bile. "I want sour food," I blurt. The old memory of who I was—of a woman who always wanted freedom and had refused everything—passes like a film across my mind. The life I had before, the bitter decisions, the crash that ended it. Then something like an ember of recognition: I'm awake. I have been given another round.
River looks at me the way someone studies the weather: briefly, calculatingly. "What do you want?" he asks.
"Wontons. Spicy and sour." I say it like a child placing an order.
He stares, then goes. He puts one gloved hand on the aluminum lunchbox he carries, and the box smells like red oil and chili when he sets it beside me. Without ceremony, he scoops one and brings it to my mouth. "Open," he says.
I do. He feeds me a slippery dumpling. The taste lights up the corners of me like a match. My eyes close. "You're keeping me?" I say. I don't mean the baby only—I mean him, and this new self the world has given me.
"If you choose to kill this child, we'll go to the hospital together," he says. "But otherwise—" He stops. That "otherwise" hangs between us like the rim of a bowl.
The past life in me had been a spoiled thing. I was Hudsyn Combs, accustomed to being attended to and to looking the other way. The old Gu Weiwei would have spat and walked away. Now, my hand—the small careful hand that had never done a dish—reaches for the spoon.
"You want them sour and spicy?" he asks with that grain of humor.
"Yes," I say, and feel the world tilt into a new orbit.
We spend the day as improbable allies. River is a minor commander in a special unit; his uniform is something I had despised in flashbacks—cold, authoritative—and yet he is quietly warm to the parts of me that are unguarded. At times he is a cliff; at others, he is a teacher. He boils the wontons. He shows me how to move a coal stove without burning my knuckles. I show him how to salt a shallow bowl like it matters.
"You're not the woman I expected," he says once as he pushes a plate across our uneven table.
"And you're not the man in the stories I told myself," I reply. "You're better."
"Who told you my stories?" he asks, eyebrows lifted.
"You did," I tell him, "in small moves. You make the beds and you look at an injury like it's a thing that must be fixed, not a drama. That's not...performative."
We laugh, and something between us tilts. I learn quickly: River's English—no, his manner—is spare. He lets the small kindnesses speak. In the kitchen he ties a rag at his waist and rolls up his sleeves; the sight is a small audial drumbeat in my chest.
Sometimes, other people intrude—colleagues, neighbors, women with greedy eyes and long memories. The camp is small; news travels like wind. "A new wife came with the unit," they whisper. "She was weak. She will not last." They smooth out the gossip like spoons on the table.
"Don't mind them," River says once, when a woman with a pointed smile leaves a tray at our door. "They don't know."
"Nobody knows what I know," I say. "I woke up inside somebody else's life. I remember how things went wrong. I remember people I loved who I should have fought for. I won't make the same mistakes."
"You can be honest with me," he says, voice steady.
"Then let me be a friend, first," I say. "Let me learn. Teach me how to make the bed the right way."
He does. Little by little, I stitch myself into the life in front of me. I eat the wontons he brings; I learn to wiggle a coal chimney back in place without coughing until I see stars. I learn compassion in the ways that aren't easy—how to swallow irritation and sit at a table where other people stare.
There are other women who like him—oh, there are always other women. A nurse in a clipped haircut, Ayako Wallace, smiles the kind smile of comradeship. Henley Wells, a neighbor's visiting sister, watches with dark eyes. A girl named Astrid Arellano nods and offers me a basket of wild herbs. Each one is a small demand from the world that I belong here or not.
"Don't be blind," Ayako says to me once in the narrow hallway. "Men like him get offered a lot. You are young."
"I will not be a contest," I tell her. "If he wants me, he will live with me. If not—" My mouth closes. I do not want to think of losing the warmth for the sake of my stubborn pride.
"Do you love him?" she asks.
"I haven't decided," I say. "But I want to be someone someone would choose to love."
We begin living like a pair who had been in danger together. He brings papers from the office—old military notes in a language of drills—and I help him with translations. He is as surprised as anyone when I correct a technical term; the truth is, the old life had me reading and living in another language. I can roll words like coins in my mouth.
"How do you know this?" he wonders, late at night, when we sit side by side with a book spread between us. My pronunciation makes the long words fall soft in the air.
"I worked in trade," I tell him. "I was a translator in another life. I know a handful of tongues."
He looks at me like some small miracle. The way his face softens makes me forget the cold rooms and false friends.
When people began to circle like hungry moths, I learned inspection and the smell of jealousies. There was a nurse—Astrid—who meant well. There was a neighbor, Chiara Riley, who pretended at innocence. But there is one that keeps my eyes sharp: Henley Wells. Her smile is a blade disguised in silk.
"She comes with her sister," Henley says one afternoon, offering me dumplings with one hand and a dangerous glance with another. "She has a presence. Be careful."
"Thanks for the warning," I say. "I fought worse."
Then the first fracture. My brother, Brantley Barnes, shows up like a storm. He stands at the foot of River's door in a suit too light for the cold and carries a manner that smells faintly of markets and debts. Patricia Dean—my mother in the other life, now my mother in this one—arrives with him, eyes that say everything can be traded.
"Everyone likes to come when things are good," I tell River later, trying to keep my voice light. "They like to set a trap in the seams of kindness."
Brantley is nervy, a man who looks comfortable with bargains. "Hudsyn," he says, with the brotherly familiarity I never lived with. "Come stay with me in my house. It's warmer, there's more food. We'll take care of you."
"This is my home," I say. "I am with River."
"That's the problem," Brantley says, with a smile like a hinge. "Being married to a soldier is... uncertain. Come, we'll find you a steady path. You could even get a city job—"
River looks at him the way a field looks at a pest. "Hudsyn's choices are hers," he says. He is civil, because he will always be civil in public, but his jaw hardens.
The arrival of my brother and mother is not harmless. In the middle of training season a whisper goes through the unit: uniforms are coming with the wrong filling. Blankets are thin where they should be thick. The men complain about cold. Grievances gather and grow until someone finds a pattern.
"We have to check the supply chain," River says bluntly, and for the first time I see a small dark well of tired anger.
In the edge of the unit, news arrives that a stranger fluent in multiple foreign tongues had been seen in the town. River frowns. "We are being tested," he says.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"Someone is trying to make us look careless," he says. "Someone is trying to take what isn't theirs—"
"It could be anyone," I say. "Even a neighbor."
The truth is worse. I overhear a conversation: my brother is planning something. I do not mean to spy; I stumbled into his office by accident as I looked for cash he'd promised. Brantley is talking to an acquaintance in hushed tones.
"If the unit walks that path," I hear him say, "we plant the charges along the slope they will use on the fourth march. A misstep and we'll have an accident they can't explain."
"Harm them?" the other man asks, startled.
"It'll look like hunting snares," Brantley replies. "No trace, no one will look back. The result—no blame on us."
I stand there with my mouth filling with a cold I have never known. The world bends.
I do not run. I go to River. "Brantley might be planning something," I tell him cleanly. "I heard him."
He does not shout. He sits down and his hands twist into fists. "Why would he—"
"My mother," I say. "Patricia Dean—they aren't what they seem."
He moves. He gathers a small team, his men folding into him like a net. "We move quiet," he says. "We cannot make a spectacle of this or they'll hide. We will check the route. We will be careful."
We move fast. I go with them. The ground smells of thawing snow. The path is narrow; if someone set a trap, they'd set it where the unit walked confidently, where the long days had worn a track. We find thin wires fixed under rocks, hidden snares, a small neat array of hidden explosives wrapped in hunting leather. My stomach drops. My hands shake.
"Who would do this?" I whisper.
"They trained in ways we do not tolerate," River says. "Someone on the inside may have made a mistake. We will bring this to the commander."
But the commander does not want a scandal. There is fear of politics, of careers turned to ash. For a moment it seems our small team will be the only ones to carry the knowledge. I sleep badly, listening for footsteps. At night, in the thin bed, I touch my belly as if to make something solid of my shame.
The morning of discovery becomes a public theater. River organizes a controlled meeting with the local leadership and some civilian officials. The town square fills. People gather—wives, soldiers, children—each face a small mirror concerned about the violation inside their town.
I stand at River’s side when he holds up a length of tampered cable, the kind used to secure a makeshift trap. "This was found on a unit route," he tells the cluster of officials. "We discovered devices intended to hurt our soldiers and any civilians on that road."
Someone from the supply office looks stricken. A murmuring spreads. People shift, the way a flock murmurs before a storm. I see my brother in the crowd, sucking air like he has been slapped. I see Patricia Dean lean back, lips pale.
"Who did this?" a woman in a red scarf demands aloud.
"We will find out," River answers. "We are asking for calm while we investigate."
There is a lecture. There are promises of bloodless investigations. A public taste of justice.
And then we find fingerprints on paper rolled into a tin near a trail—a receipt, a small signed purchase for materials, with a handwriting that leads back to person who can access the route maps: Brantley Barnes. The murmurs rise. The crowd becomes a warm weather ready to thunder.
"You?" someone shouts. "Brantley Barnes? How could you?"
My brother's face drains. He tries to speak and every syllable is a pebble he cannot swallow. He looks at Patricia Dean; she looks at the ground like a woman who expects rain and finds dust. Then the commander—Rhys Dunn—takes the lead and speaks in a voice that feels like a gavel.
"This is treason against our men," he says. "You are accused of endangering lives."
Here I must stop and describe, in full, what happens because this is not a private arrest tucked away in paperwork. Brantley and Patricia are brought forward to the largest meeting the town square has seen in months. People crowd the edges—wives with hands on their mouths, children biting lips, old men who have seen wars and think this is some small version of ruin. There are cameras—journalists from the city had come when news of the suspicious uniforms spread. The air is bitter and sharp.
The commander arranges a simple stage: a table, a staff, a microphone. Brantley stands with a stringy face. Patricia stands beside him, smaller than she was the day I left home.
"You told me we could get a better life," Brantley says in a cracked voice, trying to lay the blame on the other man. "He told me to—"
But the proof is not a rumor. It is the tin with his handwriting, a logbook that logs a line of purchases and where the devices were to be left. The town's inspector points at the ledger. The pattern is clear and damning.
"Why?" asks an old widow from the back. Her voice is thin and brittle with years.
Brantley's bravado crumbles. He tries to chuckle. That laugh comes out like a dry twig. He reaches for explanation: debts, threats, pride. "They told me—" his voice breaks—"they said if we did this they'd pay. I only wanted to get money to move to the city."
"You almost killed men and children," a neighbor shouts, a woman I had once exchanged tea with. "You almost killed our wives."
Patricia's face melts in stages. At first there is denial: "He wouldn't—" Then there is shock, then a slow, public suffocation of realization. Her fingers twist in her apron. You can almost hear the crowd rearrange itself into shapes of judgment. The men who had admired her quiet sense of thrift step back. Someone takes out a camera and starts recording.
For a long time the punishment is not immediate thunder or a legal hammer brought down in minutes. This is worse for them: their names will not be secret. There are refrains I cannot forget—Brantley's throat audibly working in the pause; a woman next to me whispering "disgrace" like a prayer. The people close enough begin to shout questions—Why? How could you? What do you say to the young lads who trusted you?
Brantley, at the center, has a sequence of reactions that could be one of those small tragedies: at first he almost smiles, thinking of bargaining his way out—then his face changes to shock; he shakes his head and denies it, "No, I didn't!" Then the ledger is held up, the handwriting compared, and his denial turns to reckless apologies. He begs the veterans among us. He tries bargaining: "I will pay back—" He tries then to laugh, a thin masking laugh. A neighbor throws language at him like pebbles. He pleads—then collapses into a heap of grief as shame fills the space everyone had reserved for gossip. People record it on their phones; some clap because they are angry and perhaps because this is how small towns mend: by naming the offenders.
Patricia, who had earlier tried to act like she did not know, reaches the stage after and collapses in front of the assembly, hands out as if to shield herself. The crowd responds with a mix of pity and scorn—pity because she is small; scorn because she was about complicity.
"I didn't think he would do it," she cries. "I didn't think—" Her voice cracks and a man near the front—Fillmore Eklund, one of River’s colleagues—says softly, "You cared for money more than for people." It is not a line for the newspapers; it is private. The crowd murmurs, and the corner of my heart closes like a fist.
Finally, the commander orders the immediate removal of Brantley and Patricia for military interrogation. They are not lynched in the square; instead, they are taken away publicly—escorted by soldiers with boots that echo off the cobbles. The spectacle is humiliating in the most complete sense: their secrets are out; everyone sees the two of them led in slow confusion and shame.
The punishment does not stop there. The community does what communities do: they shift. The local tradesmen close shops against them; the women in the market stop offering a friendly basket. Brantley arrives back three days later to find his house shuttered, with notices stapled to the door: "Under Investigaton." He tries at first to push the notices away and find sympathy, but the town, that living breathing organism, has turned on them. A neighbor—once a friend—spits in the street as he walks past. Someone posts a sign calling out "traitor" and names him.
"How could you?" my mother says once, during a visit I had not asked for. She is diminished now. Her eyes, which used to be made of small calculations, contain only a raw, empty sorrow. "I thought he was going to help you. I thought I could fix things."
"Fix things by hurting soldiers?" I ask. The town is listening. The old men stare like judges. "He put people's lives at risk."
Patricia breaks down in the public entryway of the small hall where they have been called. She begins to insult herself the way someone slaps their own face repeatedly. The neighbors stand and stare. Some whisper sympathy. Others whisper "greed."
At the end of the week, with the ledger printed and the statements taken, a hearing is called. It is not a legal court in the capital, but the military makes the calls now when service risk is involved. The hearing is public. The entire town attends. Brantley reads out a half-broken apology that might have been meant for a different man. People get to ask one question each. The small window in the community's life closes around them like a trap.
After the hearing—after the official reprimands and the decision that the family will be stripped of certain benefits and will receive military sanctions—what remains is the public humiliation. The neighbors who had once run to borrow a cup now avoid them. Men who once nodded now look away. In a small town, the loss of reputation can eat a path through years. This is slower and more thorough than a punishment of bars.
Men clap, some quietly, not in the celebration of the humiliation but in the relief of justice. "We can't have people who would risk us all," someone says aloud, and the sentence is agreed upon like a law without parchment.
Brantley tries to speak one last time before they lead him away. "I only wanted to move to the city—"
"You risked every life in this valley for money," River says, voice low and final. "You chose wrong."
He steps back. The crowd parts as the soldiers escort the two out. The cameras click. And in the weeks after, the town's gossip does what the formal system could not: it ostracizes them. Their friends stop bringing them fruit, their allies cease to bring them jobs. The cold bites for them in ways money cannot fix. That is punishment enough.
After the public collapse, the hardest blow is to the family bonds themselves. Patricia goes to pieces privately, and the neighbors whisper that even the faith of a mother has limits. Brantley is put through the military investigative process; eventually he is dismissed from his posts. The last I heard, he was trying to sell off goods to pay some liabilities, and Patricia had taken to quiet walks in the park, hands empty, a small bag at her side like a relic.
What I remember most is the sudden quiet that fell over our house afterward. People come and go, but the gossip died down into something else: caution. River holds me tighter in the night for reasons beyond me. His hands smell of oil and resolved anger.
After the scandal, the unit's morale lifts slowly. People sleep better when they believe the danger has a name and that the name has been called and answered. The press prints a small piece about how local vigilance saved the unit from disaster. I find myself both proud and hollow: proud that I spoke up, hollow that my own blood had planned against us.
For a while I cannot speak to my mother. She avoids my eyes. I walk the streets like a foreigner in my own body. Yet, River is there. He holds my hand and does not let it go.
"He asked for this," someone says once, pointing at Brantley as he is led away. "The city was in his mind. He gave up the village for his greed."
"You did the right thing," River whispers to me that night, his breath warm against my ear. "You saved people."
I have never been proud of a larger thing. The feeling looms and then fades, a small coin I have carried to keep myself warm. Afterwards, life rebuilds in small, particular ways. People bring us small gifts of thanks. An old woman from the market comes with a jar of pickled cucumbers. Ayako makes soup. Even Henley—after the initial feud—stands at a distance and nods.
We try to be ordinary. We attempt marriage in full, not as a contract but as a kind of small project. River teaches me to tie knots properly. I teach him to say "wonton" with the correct smile. We go to the town to buy flour and I practice speaking with simple currency as if learning to hold an egg without breaking it.
Months pass that are not the kind of months you sum up. We have small hearts—small tendernesses—that even in the face of dangers rearrange the lines of life. He meets a man named Pierre Reid—an investigative man who had helped us—and we share a few quiet afternoons: Pierre eats my cooking and judges it wise with a raised eyebrow. We meet Rhys Dunn and Fillmore Eklund in official meetings where the world is measured in small pieces of paper and maps.
There are terrible swings. The loss I carried from the attempt on the line had cost a child. I grieve that child as a wound with its edges still raw. Sometimes I think of that dream I had in the field—of the boy who would come back to me and say, "Mom, I remember your smell," and I rage at a hole that cannot be sewn.
But I am alive. I am part of a man who will not let me be a thing of ruination. I have friends who are real in the way soldiers can become family. Small joys occur, like a bowl of hot wontons on a rainy morning, River's annoyed smile when I bite the edge of my own lip, and evenings when we trade confidences. "Promise me one thing," he says once, and I know this is a test. "If you ever want to leave—find your life—not as my fault."
"I won't leave you," I say, truthfully. I will not leave River, but I will not hide. "But if anything ever pulls us away, I'll come back."
"Good," he says simply, and his hand finds mine, rough and sure.
I have learned that to love someone is not to choose to be helpless. It is to become someone who can carry things with them and face storms together. My past is a map of mistakes. My present is a room full of silence and the clatter of spoons. In the corner of that room sits the dented aluminum lunchbox with the red oil stains—our small altar to survival. Every time River opens it for me, I remember how he first scooped a wonton to my mouth and decided, without fanfare, to keep the child and not let me sign my life away.
We plant our days with tenderness and caution. I take English packets and teach River the shapes of foreign words. He teaches me knots and how to read a path. I cook, and once in a while I let a rival pass us by with a smile that says I'm not worth a scrap. People who plotted against us were punished—publicly, thoroughly, and in a way that turned them small and kept their secret names as a lesson.
One evening, months later, I stand in the doorway of our little house as River hands me a bowl of wontons. The night has teeth in it; the wind pushes a thin snow against the window. I hold the bowl to my chest like a small relic and think of all the living and un-living things I carry inside me.
"Will you always keep that tin?" I ask, nodding toward the stained aluminum box on the shelf.
He smiles. "I will always keep it," he says, and the spoon clinks softly. The sound, small and ordinary, is more home than any speech.
We warm the wontons, and when I eat the first one, I close my eyes and hear the city's distant traffic in a dream. For now, the radio is off and the pipes are quiet. For now, River's arm is a steady place to rest my head. The lunchbox is dented and red-stained, but the memory inside is what matters—the night he refused to let me throw my life away and fed me a spoonful of hope.
The End
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