“Do it yourself. I’m not your babysitter.” The man abandoned his dying wife and went to the beach with his mistress. When he came back, he grabbed his head in despair.

Michael never imagined he would end up in such a place. When he married Emily fifteen years ago, he had sworn to be by her side “for better or worse, in sickness and in health.” But when “worse” and “sickness” became their daily reality, Michael realized he wasn’t the man he thought he was.

Emily’s diagnosis had struck like lightning from a clear sky. Stage IV pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was grim—months, maybe a year with aggressive treatment. In the first weeks, Michael had been there, holding her hand at appointments, helping her out of bed, preparing meals she barely touched. But with each passing day, each groan of pain, each hospital visit, something inside him started to break.

He couldn’t stand seeing her suffer. He couldn’t bear the smell of medication that clung to their home. He couldn’t handle watching his once vibrant and beautiful wife turn into a fragile skeleton, with yellowish skin and sunken eyes.

Jessica entered his life like a breath of fresh air. A nurse at the oncology clinic, she had offered a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear. Their coffee meetings turned into dinners, then into nights spent together while Emily slept, sedated by painkillers.

“We deserve a little happiness too,” Jessica had whispered one evening. “Let’s run away somewhere, just the two of us. Just for a week. So you can forget everything.”

And so, on a rainy September morning, Michael did the unthinkable. He left some food in the fridge for Emily, placed her medications on the nightstand, and told her he was leaving for a professional training course.

“But who will take care of me?” she asked in a faint voice, her tearful eyes searching his.

“Do it yourself. I’m not your babysitter,” he replied with a cruelty he didn’t recognize as his own. “You have a phone. Call 911 if it’s an emergency.”

He turned off his phone for the entire week, basking in the sun of the East Coast, in Jessica’s youthful body, in the freedom of not being chained to someone else’s suffering. For the first time in months, he felt alive again.

But on the last night, a disturbing dream woke him in a sweat. He saw Emily’s face—not the sick one, but the one from their wedding day—looking at him with deep disappointment. He woke with a terrible sense of dread and, for the first time in seven days, turned on his phone.

33 missed calls. 17 messages. The last one was from their neighbor, Mrs. Thompson:

“Michael, please call me. It’s urgent. Emily was hospitalized yesterday in critical condition. She’s not answering the phone. The doctor says she doesn’t have much time left.”

He left that very night, abandoning Jessica as she slept, not even leaving a note. He sped down the highway, praying it wasn’t too late to ask for forgiveness.

When he arrived at the hospital, it was already too late. Emily had died just a few hours earlier, alone in a cold hospital room. The night nurse told him her final words were his name.

Back home, Michael found chaos. Emily had tried to manage on her own but had fallen in the bathroom. She had crawled to the phone to call for help. Blood stains on the floor marked her desperate effort.

On the kitchen table, an envelope. Inside it, a letter and a key.

“Dear Michael,

By the time you read this, I probably won’t be here anymore. I don’t blame you for leaving. I understand how hard it was for you. I know about Jessica. I saw you with her when you thought I was asleep. And I forgive you.

I’ve loved you from the first day, and I love you still as I write these words with trembling hands. I don’t want you to live with guilt. I want you to be happy. But I also want you to know the truth.

The key in this envelope opens the safe deposit box at the bank. Inside, you’ll find the results of genetic tests I took in secret. My illness wasn’t random, Michael. It’s hereditary. And if you carry the same gene, Jessica deserves to know what she’s getting into.

With eternal love,
Emily”

Michael collapsed to the floor with the letter in his hands and cried until there were no tears left. The next few days passed in a blur of alcohol and regret.

At the funeral, he sat alone, shunned by Emily’s family and friends. Only Mrs. Thompson, their neighbor, cast him a look full of contempt and whispered, “She spent her last hours calling your name. She died with the phone in her hand.”

Only after the last guest had left did Michael gather the strength to go to the bank. In the safe, he found a thick medical file. He opened it with trembling hands.

What he discovered made him clutch his head in disbelief. The genetic tests revealed that the syndrome that had killed Emily was caused by exposure to a specific toxic substance—one used in the factory where Michael worked as a chemical engineer. A substance he had unknowingly brought home on his clothes, day after day, year after year, silently poisoning her.

Emily had not only forgiven him for the affair and for abandoning her, but she had also protected him from the devastating truth: he had been, unknowingly, the cause of her death.

His phone vibrated. A message from Jessica:
“Where did you disappear? I’m waiting for you to explain.”

With tears in his eyes, Michael turned off his phone. He had difficult decisions to make. If the tests were right, Jessica needed to know that the man she had fallen in love with might be a danger to her. And he had to live with the truth that while he had been running from responsibility and seeking happiness in another woman’s arms, his wife had died slowly, poisoned by his neglect.

He looked at their wedding photo—the only one he hadn’t hidden when the affair began. Emily’s radiant face seemed to gaze at him with the same gentle smile she had always offered, even in her final days.

“Forgive me,” he whispered, knowing that no words could fix what he had done—or, more importantly, what he hadn’t done.

In the days that followed, Michael disappeared from everyone’s life. He resigned from the factory, sold the house filled with painful memories, and moved to a small mountain town, far from everything and everyone. The only thing he kept was Emily’s letter—a constant reminder of the price of his selfishness.

And in a drawer, unopened, he placed the results of his own genetic tests. The tests that confirmed he, too, carried the signs of the same illness that had taken Emily. He had maybe a year, maybe two, to live with the truth and the consequences of his choices.

Sometimes, sitting on the porch of his cabin, looking at the distant mountains, he wondered if Emily—wherever she was—had found the strength to truly forgive him. And if he would ever find the strength to forgive himself.

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