At 67, Margaret thought the hardest part of losing her husband would be coming home to an empty house. She was wrong.
The hardest part was realizing how much of her life she had stopped living while she was still married. For forty-one years, almost every decision had been made with someone else in mind—where they would go, what they would eat, who they would visit, and when they would travel.Even something as simple as ordering coffee had become a habit of asking, “What are you having?” Then, one evening, everything changed.
Margaret discovered that her husband had been seeing another woman. Not for a few weeks or a few months, but for nearly two years.When she confronted him, she expected an apology. Instead, he simply sat at the kitchen table and said, “I didn’t think you’d ever find out.”
Those words hurt more than the betrayal itself. Not because they meant he hadn’t loved her, but because they revealed how little he had believed she could do without him.