It was choosing yourself. Claire squeezed my hand. You ready? I smiled. Yeah.
We walked toward the parking lot together. I didn't look back again. A few weeks after I saw Wanda, I received one final letter from her. It wasn't an email this time. It was a handwritten letter addressed to my new house.
I recognized her handwriting immediately. For a few minutes, I left it sitting on the kitchen counter. Part of me didn't want to open it, not because I was angry, because I knew there was nothing in that letter that could change anything. Eventually, I opened it. Wanda didn't ask me to come back.
She didn't blame Jack. She didn't ask for another chance. She simply wrote about the life we had shared. She remembered our first apartment, our first vacation, the night we got married, the stupid arguments we'd had over things neither of us could remember anymore. Then she wrote about our 10th anniversary.
She said she had thought about that night almost every day since the divorce. She remembered walking into the restaurant an hour late. She remembered seeing me sitting alone. She remembered the way I looked at her when I asked where she'd been. She said that was the moment she realized she had already lost me.
At the end, she wrote that she hoped I would eventually stop thinking about the woman who betrayed me and remember the woman I had once loved. I folded the letter. I didn't destroy it. I didn't keep it on my desk. I put it in a drawer and closed it.
Then I walked outside. Claire was waiting in the backyard. She looked at me. Everything okay? Yeah.
Was it from Wanda? Yes. What did she say? Goodbye. Claire nodded.
Are you okay with that? I looked around my backyard. The house was quiet. The evening sun was disappearing behind the trees. Yes.
Claire smiled. Good. I walked over and sat beside her. She took my hand. For a while, neither of us spoke.
I thought about everything that had happened. The anniversary dinner, the hour I spent waiting, the smell of another man's cologne, the messages on Wanda's phone, Jack, the divorce, the house, the courthouse. All of it had happened because Wanda made a choice. But I had made choices, too. I chose not to beg.
I chose not to threaten Jack. I chose not to spend years trying to make Wanda regret what she had done. I chose to leave. And eventually, I chose to live again. My marriage had given me memories I would always carry.
Some good, some painful. But it had also taught me something I didn't understand before. You can't force someone to respect a commitment. You can't love someone into being honest. And you can't rebuild a marriage by yourself.
Wanda had made her choice. I had made mine. That was enough. The 10th anniversary that was supposed to celebrate 10 years of marriage had instead exposed the truth.
Wanda cheated with Jack. She lied to me. She chose another man. And I divorced her.
But that wasn't the part of the story that mattered most. The important part was what happened afterward. I stopped begging for someone to choose me. I stopped confusing forgiveness with trust.
And I stopped looking backward. My marriage ended on our 10th anniversary. My life didn't. In fact, that was the day I finally started living it for myself.