I never imagined that the last time he ordered coffee for me—without asking how I liked it now—would be the final moment we shared. I walked out furious, convinced his stubborn rituals proved he’d never really seen me. I wanted room to breathe, to choose for myself, to feel heard after decades of compromise that felt like erasure.

When the lawyer’s call came, the word “collapsed” sliced through every defense I’d built. At the hospital, his life reduced to a plastic bag, I held the letter that carried the weight of fifty years. In uneven lines, he admitted he hadn’t fought the divorce because he thought loving me meant letting me go. Sitting in that corridor, I finally saw the truth: I wasn’t running from him, but from wounds we never named. Our love hadn’t disappeared; our time had. And that was the one thing we could never renegotiate.