I had imagined every possible explanation for his disappearance—accident, amnesia, even death—but never this: he had simply chosen someone else. Sitting across from him in that café, listening to how an old high school sweetheart had resurfaced and “reignited” his love, I felt time collapse. While I was memorizing his smile in fading photographs, he was building a new life, a new Sunday routine, a new version of himself that didn’t include me.
Walking away from him outside that café was both agony and liberation. I finally stopped waiting at a door that would never open. Forgiving him was not a gift to the man who abandoned me; it was a quiet surrender of the weight I’d carried alone for seventeen years. When I called Jake, it wasn’t to replace Richard, but to choose myself—my healing, my joy, my future—over a story that had already ended.
