My wife of fifty years just passed away. Everyone called me devoted for staying by her side until her last breath. As I sorted through her things, I found a stack of journals, tucked away in a dusty box. Her elegant script filled the pages, but the words, page after page, year after year, were for another man: Caleb Blakely. Fifty years of our marriage had been a lie, her every action orchestrated to protect her secret passion for him. Her "medical trauma," the reason she claimed we could never be intimate, was a cruel fabrication. And my son, Leo-the boy I raised and loved with all my soul after his mother died-he wasn't just my nephew in spirit. He was Caleb' s biological son. The man I thought was my brother, the woman I devoted my life to, they had made me a fool, an unpaid nanny, a convenient placeholder. The agony of five decades of deceit crushed me, and my heart, already weak from age and grief, finally gave out. Then I gasped, eyes flying open, perfectly healthy and impossibly young, back in my bed with the morning sunlight streaming through the window. I was back. Fifty years in the past. Jocelyn was walking in the door, briefcase in hand, ready to begin the betrayal all over again. Not this time.
My wife of fifty years just passed away. Everyone called me devoted for staying by her side until her last breath.
As I sorted through her things, I found a stack of journals, tucked away in a dusty box.
Her elegant script filled the pages, but the words, page after page, year after year, were for another man: Caleb Blakely.
Fifty years of our marriage had been a lie, her every action orchestrated to protect her secret passion for him.
Her "medical trauma," the reason she claimed we could never be intimate, was a cruel fabrication.
And my son, Leo-the boy I raised and loved with all my soul after his mother died-he wasn't just my nephew in spirit. He was Caleb' s biological son.
The man I thought was my brother, the woman I devoted my life to, they had made me a fool, an unpaid nanny, a convenient placeholder.
The agony of five decades of deceit crushed me, and my heart, already weak from age and grief, finally gave out.
Then I gasped, eyes flying open, perfectly healthy and impossibly young, back in my bed with the morning sunlight streaming through the window.
I was back. Fifty years in the past. Jocelyn was walking in the door, briefcase in hand, ready to begin the betrayal all over again.
Not this time.
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