Fading Away with His Regret

I never expected my last moment of life would come so quietly, so ordinarily, on a Tuesday evening while preparing Adam's favorite roasted chicken.

The familiar rhythm of chopping vegetables suddenly faltered when that first crushing pressure seized my chest.

The knife clattered against the cutting board as my hand flew to my heart, fingers clutching at my blouse as though I could somehow reach inside and massage the failing muscle back to life.

"Adam?" I called, my voice barely a whisper as the kitchen titled sideways.

The pain was extraordinary—like being crushed between two concrete walls, a vise tightening with each labored heartbeat.

I crumpled against the cold tile, knocking over the chair Adam never sat in anyway.

My body betrayed me with violent convulsions, lungs gasping for air that wouldn't come.

In those final moments of consciousness, my thoughts weren't profound or meaningful.

They were pathetically ordinary: Adam would be annoyed about dinner.

The chicken would burn. He would sigh that particular sigh—the one that said I'd disappointed him again.

Then darkness.

* * *

The fluorescent lights of New York Presbyterian's ICU stuttered into focus above me, but something was wrong. I felt weightless, detached. Below me, doctors swarmed around a body on a gurney—my body—their voices urgent but strangely muffled, as though I was hearing them through water.

"Clear!" A female doctor pressed paddles to my chest. My body jumped, but the monitor continued its mournful, unbroken tone. "Again! Clear!"

I drifted toward the doorway where Adam stood, his phone pressed to his ear, his back to the frantic scene inside.

"Yes, I understand the Tokyo deal is time-sensitive," he was saying, voice crisp and businesslike. "But I'm at the hospital right now. My wife had some kind of episode."

Some kind of episode. As though I'd thrown a tantrum rather than my heart giving out. I tried to touch his shoulder, to make him turn around, but my hand passed through him like mist through air.

The female doctor—her badge read Dr. Sarah Mitchell—stepped out, her face grave beneath her surgical cap. "Mr. Brooks?"

Adam ended his call. "Yes?"

"I'm very sorry. We did everything we could, but your wife suffered a massive cardiac arrest. The damage was too extensive."

I waited for Adam's face to crumble, for some sign of the devastation I would have felt had our positions been reversed. Instead, his expression remained impassive, almost bored, as though she'd informed him of a minor inconvenience rather than the death of his wife.

"You did what you could," he said flatly. Then, without even glancing toward the room where my body lay, he turned and walked down the hallway.

I followed him, floating alongside, screaming words he couldn't hear. "Adam! Look at me! Thirty-four years old and my heart just stopped! Don't you care? Don't you feel anything?"

But he continued walking, his shoulders straight, his steps measured and calm as he approached the nurses' station.

"I need to sign release forms," he told the nurse. "My wife just passed."

They gave him a clipboard of papers, and he signed them with the same efficient precision he used for business contracts. I hovered beside him, watching his hand move across the page, noticing how he didn't pause, didn't falter, didn't once brush away a tear that wasn't there.

When he finished, a nurse led him back to the room where I lay. Someone had pulled a white sheet over my face. Adam stood at the foot of the bed, staring not at me but at the wall behind, as though the paint pattern was somehow more worthy of his attention than the woman he had shared a home with for five years.

"Would you like a moment alone with her?" the nurse asked gently.

"No," Adam said. "That won't be necessary."

And in that moment, floating above the sheet-covered shell that had once been me, I understood with perfect clarity what I had spent years denying: I had never been loved by this man. Not once. Not ever.

I was dead, yet somehow still here, trapped in a purgatory where I could only watch as the truth I had always feared was finally, brutally confirmed.