She reached across and squeezed my hand. “Then I’m glad you finally chose to save yourself.”
Her words remained with me.
For years, I had confused being a supportive wife with being a woman willing to tolerate endless neglect. I had convinced myself that loving someone required perpetual understanding, perpetual waiting, and perpetual forgiveness.
I was wrong.
Love requires boundaries.
A surgeon can save hundreds of people inside an operating room and still fail miserably at holding the hand of the person sitting beside him.
A woman can respect her husband’s talent while still deciding that she refuses to survive on the crumbs of his spare time.
Throughout those thirty days, Marcus had been only five floors away from me. For years, I believed that distance could be crossed with enough patience.
It wasn’t five floors.
It was a fundamental difference in the way we understood humanity.
He believed everything could be sacrificed for professional ambition and repaired afterward with a quick apology.
I finally understood that some things, after being abandoned too many times, simply stop waiting.
