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It was an easy decision to make, really. After you’ve been at someone’s side for so much time, well…you find it hard to leave.
There was a small farm they had found out in the countryside, where the pile bunkers were scarce and the fields were full of wildflowers—not a crop they could make much of a profit off of, but it was quiet, and it was peaceful, and the children didn’t say much of anything at all. But, at the same time, they didn’t seem opposed to it.
So.
Neither of them could really remember when it had stopped being so quiet. The chickens might’ve been the start of it, the rooster crowing before the sun rose, in the middle of the day, making so much damn noise that someone tried to run it off their property one night, only to wake up to his call the very next morning. With time, they had resigned themselves to his babbling, even growing fond of it.
It wasn’t that the noise was a bad thing, though. He had fixed up the little brick house, coated the old wooden barn with a fresh coat of paint or two, and it was still plenty serene, but after a year or so, with thin green vines of ivy creeping up the side of the house, it had finally begun to feel like home. Tantrums in the fields and carelessly unearthed flowers and dirt under fingernails had turned into thoughtfully plucked bouquets, glasses of water and mason jars acting as miniature vases. A small rabbit that had gotten its paw caught in one of the traps around the herb garden had become the family pet, with its own pen and all.
The children explored the grounds on their own, sometimes coming home nursing bee stings and empty stomachs and bloodied knees, but they talked, and they smiled, and they cried.
He had never been much of a gruff man, but there was something in the atmosphere that helped bleed the rest of the tension out, and he walked with a newfound ease in his limbs. Her military job hadn’t been very tough, and the labor put into fixing up the farm had brought new calluses to her hands, her cheeks and arms dotted with more freckles each day she spent out in the sun. The baby’s skin was the same in that way, and one day, he found himself with a new wedding band, sliding it onto his ring finger so he could get that same tan line, the one he so fondly remembered.
The days were long, but the nights were cool, stars filling the sky in a place distant from so many of the major cities. The moon above them shone bright, the characters etched into it just legible enough when you wanted to squint, and it made them smile, thankful for the love that had brought so much into the lives they called their own.