I didn’t faint or scream when I heard the words “heart attack.” I just went quiet, as if my body stepped aside and let the truth walk in alone. At the hospital, sound felt distant, like it had to swim through water to reach me. His watch lay in a cloudy plastic bag, still set to his usual routine, as though tomorrow had every intention of arriving.
The envelope with my name waited beside it, small and impossibly heavy. His handwriting shook, but the sentences did not. He wrote that he loved me enough to let me leave, that he understood my hunger for a self that wasn’t always “us.” Standing there, I realized the woman I was trying to reclaim had been shaped in the long shadow of our shared years. Freedom was never about walking away; it was about making peace with the love that built me, before time quietly closed the door.
