A Final Goodbye, A Lasting Mark

For six months, a mysterious illness had been shutting down my body, but I ignored the constant pain to be the perfect, supportive wife for my successful architect husband, Clayton.

The night our marriage died, he didn't answer my calls. Instead, his young protégée sent me a photo of them wrapped in each other's arms, looking blissfully in love.

When I confronted him, he called me hysterical and chose her. I soon discovered she was pregnant-he was building the family we were supposed to have with another woman.

Desperate, I ran to my mother for comfort, but she took his side.

"Clayton is a good man," she said. "Don't be difficult."

He had promised to care for me in sickness and in health, but he and my family abandoned me when I was at my weakest, dismissing my pain as drama.

But that day, I received my own diagnosis: terminal brain cancer. I only had months left.

And in that moment, all the grief vanished. I wasn't going to die a victim. I was going to live my last days for myself, and he was going to live the rest of his life with the consequences.

Chapter 1

Ariel Bryant POV:

The night my marriage died, it began not with a bang, but with the suffocating silence of an unanswered phone.

It was 11:00 PM. Then midnight. Then 1:00 AM.

Rain hammered against the floor-to-ceiling windows of our apartment, the city lights below blurring into a watercolor mess of neon and shadow. Each gust of wind felt like a physical blow against the glass, rattling the frame and my already frayed nerves.

A dull, familiar ache settled deep in my bones, a constant companion for the past six months. It started in my joints and radiated outward, a slow burn that left me perpetually exhausted. I pulled the cashmere throw tighter around my shoulders, but the chill was internal, seeping out from my very core.

My thumb hovered over Clayton' s contact photo on my phone screen. It was a picture from our honeymoon in Santorini, his charismatic smile blindingly bright against the backdrop of the Aegean Sea. He looked invincible. Happy. In love.

I pressed the call button for the tenth time.

Voicemail. Again.

"Hi, it' s Clay. Leave a message."

His voice, usually a warm baritone that could soothe any of my anxieties, now sounded hollow and distant through the tiny speaker.

I scrolled through our message history. The last text from him was at 4:30 PM.

`Clayton: Meeting running late. Don' t wait up for dinner.`

`Ariel: Okay. Everything alright?`

`Ariel: Love you.`

My last two messages were marked as 'Delivered,' but not 'Read.'

This wasn't like him. Clayton was ambitious, a rising star in the architecture world who lived by his calendar, but he was also meticulous. He always answered. Always. Even if it was a quick, one-word text, he checked in.

My own message bubble blinked accusingly on the screen.

`Ariel: Hey, just checking in. It's getting late.` (Sent 9:15 PM)

`Ariel: Is the meeting still going? Getting a little worried.` (Sent 10:30 PM)

`Ariel: Clay, please just let me know you're okay.` (Sent 12:45 AM)

The three dots of me typing appeared and disappeared as I wrote and deleted another message. A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I gripped the arm of the sofa, my knuckles white. My doctors had dismissed it as stress, hypochondria, the vague complaints of a woman with too much time on her hands. "Get more sleep, Ariel. Try yoga."

But this feeling, this profound physical weakness, felt like more than stress. It felt like my body was slowly, quietly shutting down.

A notification pinged at the top of my screen, and my heart leaped into my throat.

It wasn't a text from Clayton.

It was a friend request on social media.

`Kiersten Lowe wants to be your friend.`

I didn' t recognize the name. Her profile picture was a professional headshot-a young woman, probably in her mid-twenties, with sharp, intelligent eyes and a confident smile. Her bio was short, almost aggressive in its ambition.

`Junior Architect @ Mendez & Associates. Building a future, one blueprint at a time.`

Mendez & Associates. Clayton' s firm. She was his new protégée, the one he' d been raving about for weeks. "She' s brilliant, Ari. A real killer instinct."

A cold dread, heavier and more chilling than my illness, crept up my spine. Why would his young, ambitious colleague be sending me a friend request at 1:30 in the morning?

My finger trembled as I clicked on her profile. It was public. The top post was from two hours ago. A single photo.

No, not a photo. A statement.

It was a picture of a sleek, modern bar, the kind Clayton loved. In the foreground, two cocktail glasses were raised in a toast. One hand was unmistakably male, strong, with the silver signet ring I had given him for our third anniversary clearly visible on his pinky finger.

The other hand was delicate, feminine, with perfectly manicured nails painted a deep, blood-red.

The caption beneath the photo was a single, devastating sentence.

`To new beginnings with the man who sees my future as clearly as I do.`

My breath hitched. It felt like the air was being vacuumed out of the room. My mind raced, trying to find a logical explanation. A team celebration. A client dinner. Anything but what my gut was screaming at me.

Then I saw it. Reflected in the curved glass of Clayton' s cocktail was the distorted image of the person holding the phone. It was her. Kiersten Lowe. And leaning in close to her, his head almost touching hers, was my husband.

My thumb, acting of its own accord, hit the 'Confirm' button on her friend request.

Instantly, a new message popped up. It wasn' t words.

It was a photo.

Sent directly to me.

There was no ambiguity this time. No distorted reflection. It was Clayton and Kiersten, seated in a plush booth. His arm was draped possessively around her shoulders, and he was laughing, a full-throated, joyful laugh I hadn' t heard in months. Her head was tilted back, resting against his chest, her eyes closed in a look of pure bliss.

They looked like a couple in love.

My phone slipped from my numb fingers and clattered onto the hardwood floor. The screen didn' t crack, but something inside me shattered into a million irreparable pieces.

I stared at the image, my vision blurring with tears. The background. It was Marco' s, our favorite Italian restaurant. The place he took me on our first anniversary, the place where he swore we' d celebrate every milestone for the rest of our lives.

The photo was a declaration of war. And I had just willingly walked onto the battlefield, completely unarmed.

My fingers, clumsy and shaking, picked up the phone. I opened our message thread again, the one filled with my unanswered pleas.

My thumbs flew across the keyboard, the words fueled by a sudden, white-hot rage that burned through the fog of my illness and grief.

`Ariel: Who is she, Clayton?`

`Ariel: Answer me.`

`Ariel: WHERE ARE YOU?`

I sent another message, this time to the stranger who had just ripped my world apart.

`Ariel: What is this? Who are you?`

Silence.

On both fronts.

I spent the rest of the night curled up on the cold floor, staring at the picture of my husband' s betrayal, the rain outside finally slowing to a miserable, weeping drizzle. The physical pain in my body was nothing compared to the gaping wound in my chest.

Just before dawn, exhaustion finally claimed me. I drifted into a fitful sleep, only to be thrown into a nightmare. In the dream, I was standing in a field of withered flowers. Clayton was there, across the field, holding Kiersten' s hand. He wasn' t looking at me with anger, but with something far worse: pity.

"You' re just so tired all the time, Ariel," he said, his voice echoing in the dreamscape. "Kiersten has... energy."

I woke with a gasp, the phantom pain of his words sharper than any real-life insult. My cheeks were wet with tears.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside me.

A new message from Kiersten Lowe.

It wasn't a reply to my question. It was another photo.

This one was of them in a kitchen. Not a restaurant kitchen. My kitchen. Clayton was standing behind her, his hands on her waist, guiding her as she stirred something in a pot on the stove. A pot I recognized. It was part of the expensive cookware set he' d bought me as a wedding gift.

He had promised me a lifetime of shared meals and quiet moments in that kitchen.

Now, he was building those memories with someone else.

My carefully constructed world had not just cracked; it had been systematically demolished, and the architect of my destruction was the one man I thought would protect me from any storm.

A violent, guttural sob escaped my lips. I typed a frantic, furious message to Kiersten, my thumbs slipping on the tear-streaked screen.

`Ariel: What are you doing? Who do you think you are?`

`Ariel: You're destroying a marriage. A home.`

There was a pause, just long enough for me to think she might ignore me again. Then, the three little dots appeared. She was typing.

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