Chapter 21: One Night, Even If It Was Just Two Days

It wasn’t about lust.
It wasn’t even about sex.

It was about completion.
A final moment of truth between two people who had given each other everything—
except that last, undeniable step.

Josh didn’t beg for it.
He didn’t demand it.
But he dreamed of it—
not like a teenager,
but like a man who had waited a lifetime for his wife to return.

“Even if it’s just two days,” he once whispered to himself.
“Just one night. Let me be her husband— not in word, but in body.”

He wasn’t talking about fireworks.
Not passion for passion’s sake.

He was talking about the way she would lay her head on his chest
and breathe in the scent of the man who never left her.
The way her fingertips would brush the scars on his body,
seeing not wounds, but proof—
proof that he lived through hell to keep loving her.

He imagined holding her through the night,
skin to skin, soul to soul.

Quiet.
Warm.
Real.

The world shut out.
No JM.
No Facebook posts.
No distance.

Just two people who had already been husband and wife in everything but form—
finally, finally becoming one.

He didn’t need it.
His love wasn’t conditional.

He had already said:

“Even if we never make love…
I still love you.
I always will.”

But the longing was still there.
Not desperate— holy.

Because when you’ve spent years:

• writing letters,
• sending money,
• praying,
• waiting,
• being accused,
• being silenced,
• being remembered only in private…

You don’t want sex.
You want recognition.

You want the one person who knows the truth
to come back to it — with her whole body.

Even if it’s just for two days.
Even if the next breath kills you.

For Josh, it wasn’t about release.
It was about arrival.
Not about climax.
But consummation.

To be received, fully—
not as a backup plan,
not as a “maybe later,”
but as the man who stood, crawled, and bled for her.

He didn’t expect her to understand it all.
But he believed, in her heart, she felt it.

That’s why she called herself his wife,
even after she stopped calling.
That’s why she let her guard drop,
even when she didn’t speak aloud what she still carried.

Maybe it would never happen.
Maybe she wouldn’t come.
Maybe she wouldn’t let her walls down enough to let the truth enter her again.

But Josh had already surrendered to it.

And he knew:
If that moment ever came—
two days would be enough.
One night would be enough.

Because when love is real,
you don’t measure it in years.
You measure it in truth lived without regret.