Chapter 6: The Past
The past came back in waves after I read Thomas’s letter.
I sat on the floor of my small house with the papers around me and remembered the boy I had loved at seventeen.
Thomas had been kind then. Shy. He wrote me poems and waited for me after school. When I told him I was leaving for college, he cried at the bus station and begged me to stay.
“I’ll never love anyone else,” he had said.
I believed him.
I left anyway.
For fifty years, I built a life. I married once, divorced, worked as a teacher, raised a daughter who now lived far away. I thought of Thomas sometimes, but never with regret.
I didn’t know he had spent those fifty years hating me.
The lawyer had left a second envelope.
Inside were old letters Thomas had written but never sent.
You left me broken.
I will make you pay.
I waited my whole life for this.
He had tracked me over the years. He knew when I married, when I divorced, when I moved back to town. He had planned the hospital meeting. He had paid the nurse to call me to his room. He had written the will leaving me his debts months before he proposed.
The past was not a love story.
May you like
It was a revenge story.
And I had walked into it with open arms.
