The day I found them wasn’t a moment of betrayal at all but a moment of desperation, a confrontation that spun out of control. She apologized repeatedly in her entries—not for an affair, but for failing to protect me from heartbreak. She never expected me to walk in, never expected my misunderstanding to end so permanently, and she didn’t know how to repair what broke between us. Reading her words, I realized she had carried that guilt for years.

By the last entry, dated only a few months before her passing, her handwriting had grown shaky. She wrote about wanting to reach out to me but believing I would never listen. She wrote that she hoped I could one day forgive her—not for wrongdoing, but for her silence. She left the journal in what she called “the only place she knew I might eventually look,” trusting that time would reveal the truth. With the journal resting open on my knees, I felt years of resentment loosen, replaced by a grief I had never allowed myself to feel. The room, filled with her belongings and memories we never shared again, suddenly felt unbearably quiet.