RICHARD’S LAST LETTER
I took the letter home and placed it on the same kitchen table where Richard had confessed.
For nearly an hour, I only stared at it.
Then I opened it.
Maggie,
The first thing you deserve to know is that I never cheated on you. There was no other woman.
I said those words because I knew illness would not make you leave. Betrayal would.
I thought anger would save you faster than love ever could.
I was wrong to take the choice from you. Laura told me that from the beginning, but I was afraid. I had seen what long illness could do to a family, and I could not bear the thought of you losing the house, your retirement, or the peaceful years you earned.
I told myself that one terrible wound was better than years of fear. But I know now that I did not protect you from pain. I only changed the kind of pain you carried.
I am not asking you to forgive me.
I only want you to know that our marriage was real to me every day of those thirty-eight years. No one replaced you.
I kept the photograph from our first apartment—the one where we sat on the floor because we did not own a couch. It reminded me that the best years of my life were never about what we had. They were about who was beside me.
I hope the life you built after me became peaceful.
I hope you painted the house any color you wanted.
And I hope that someday, when you remember me, the last lie is not louder than all the years that came before it.
Richard
I read the letter twice.
Then I shouted at the empty kitchen.
“You should have told me! You should have trusted me!”
I cried until my throat hurt.
Because I would have stayed.
I would have driven him to appointments, learned his medications, sat beside hospital beds, and spent nights listening for his breathing.
Maybe that was exactly what he feared.
But it should have been my decision.
Love is not only sacrifice.
Love is also trust.
And Richard, in trying to save me, had forgotten that.
