A man and woman marry and have a child. Their son is born about eight months before the man, a West Point graduate and linguistics specialist, is deployed to Afghanistan.
The couple writes letters back and forth weekly, and the man cherishes the pictures that accompany many of his wife's letters - he watches his son grow, begin to crawl and then walk, smother himself with birthday cake, pal around with a new puppy - through pictures, from across the world. "I miss you so dearly," the letters always begin. "I never imagined how difficult it would be to sleep alone."
As the months, then years pass, the letters arrive less and less frequently and are shorter; they sometimes seem hurried, almost obligatory. Because the man speaks Arabic and has a natural gift for logistics that makes him almost invaluable, he does two back-to-back tours of duty.
His wife talks about herself less and less, and instead focuses on their son. Soon it is he who misses the man dearly, and his wife no longer mentions her loneliness. The man feels the strain of his absence in his wife's letters but chalks this up to the inherent difficulty in any prolonged separation.
The man finally returns home and is greeted at the airport with unbridled, almost manic enthusiasm by his wife. She is almost uncharacteristically over-affectionate, and as happy as he is to see her, he remembers the subtext in the letters and wonders at the behavior.
