PenPals

She has always written to strangers.

At fourteen, when the world felt too heavy for a quiet girl with mismatched eyes and a heart too soft for silence, Elara Whitmore found a way to make loneliness smaller-one letter at a time. What began as a simple act of kindness became a ritual. Ink as comfort. Paper as home.

Now twenty-three, Elara still believes that some wounds don't need medicine-just words.

When she's assigned to Staff Sergeant Rowan Hale-thirty years old, six-foot-four, decorated, distant, and deployed-she expects another quiet exchange of pleasantries. He has no listed family. No one waiting. No one writing. And he almost refuses her letter.

Almost.

Rowan isn't a man who talks about feelings. He doesn't believe in soft things. Not in hope. Not in promises. Certainly not in love written in cursive on cream-colored stationery.

But Elara writes anyway.

She tells him about the oak tree outside her window that bends but never breaks. About the way silence feels different at night. About how having one green eye and one blue makes her feel stitched together from two worlds.

And slowly, impossibly, he writes back.

Across thousands of miles and between lines carefully folded into envelopes, something begins to grow-something neither of them expected.

They have never met.
They don't know each other's touch.
They only have ink.

But sometimes ink is enough to crack armor.

And sometimes the most dangerous kind of love...
is the one that begins with,

Dear Stranger.