I don’t remember how long I stood there, frozen in the amber of my own devastation, before the sound of the shower stopping snapped me back to the present. The panic that followed was primal. I couldn’t face him—not yet. The thought of looking at his face, the face I had loved for forty years, and seeing the mask instead of the man, was too much to bear.
I grabbed my keys and fled, driving aimlessly until I found myself at the doorstep of my oldest friend, Joyce. She took one look at my pale, trembling form and knew that the catastrophe had arrived. We sat on her patio as the sun began to set, casting long, bruised shadows across the garden, and I poured out the story in jagged, broken fragments. Joyce listened in silence, pouring wine that I drank without tasting, her presence a solid anchor in the storm.
When I finally ran out of words, leaving only a hollow silence between us, she reached out and took my hand. “Helen,” she said, her voice fierce and steady, “you feel like your life is over because the life you knew is gone. But you were right to leave. This wasn’t the end of your story. It was just the beginning.”
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