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“I knew before the divorce, Arjun,” she murmured, her voice barely audible over the hum of the hospital’s ventilation system. “I found out right after my second miscarriage. The doctors did more blood tests. It wasn’t just a pregnancy complication. It was leukemia.”
Those words hit me like a punch. The sterile corridor seemed to flicker, the white neon lights transforming into a raw trail.
“You knew?” I stammered, squeezing her cold hand tighter. “You knew while we were still married? Why didn’t you tell me, Maya? Why did you let me go?”
A faint, heartbreaking smile touched her pale lips, although her eyes remained completely empty.
“Because you were already drowning, Arjun,” she said softly, returning her gaze to the blank wall in front of her. “I saw you drowning in your work. I saw you flinch every time you looked at the empty nursery. You were overwhelmed by the grief of losing our babies, and I knew… I knew that if I told you I was dying, you wouldn’t stay out of love. You would stay out of duty. You would have become my nurse, and you would have hated that burden.”
She gently removed her hand from mine, gripping the thin fabric of her hospital gown.
“I loved you too much to see you stay with me out of guilt,” she murmured. “So, when you asked for a divorce, I chose to let you be free as long as you still had the opportunity to see me as a wife, and not as a patient.”
The weight of silence
Every sleepless night at the office, every avoided conversation, every cold dinner I’d complained about—it all came flooding back, tightening into a suffocating knot of shame in my chest. I hadn’t given her any space; I’d abandoned her as she fought for her life in the silence of our home. The silence wasn’t emotional distance; it was the weight of death that Maya carried for me.
“Who is here with you?” I asked, looking around the busy hallway. “Where is your family? Your mother?”