His words struck with the precision of a blade, finding the fissures in a heart already fractured by fifty years of neglect.
I could forgive Elijah. The disease had stolen his mind, reverting him to a time before me. To him, I was a stranger keeping him from his true love.
But the man standing before me wasn't senile. He was my son. The boy I had carried, birthed, and nurtured for forty years.
A crushing weight settled in my chest. I doubled over, clutching my sternum, fighting to drag air into seizing lungs.
The realization washed over me, cold and absolute: my life had been a failure.
As a wife, I had spent half a century trying to warm a stone, only to be regarded as an enemy. As a mother, my devotion had bred a stranger who couldn't—or wouldn't—distinguish right from wrong. He saw my pain and chose the disease over the woman who raised him.
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and slipped into my shoes. I didn't look at him.
"Do you know where Amy lives now?"
My son stiffened. He'd expected a fight, or tears—not this hollow resignation. Guilt flickered in his eyes, but he gave me the address.
I scribbled it down and turned to leave.
Heavy footsteps approached from behind. Elijah grabbed my arm.
"You're going to find Amy. Take me with you. I have to see her."
It wasn't a request. It was a compulsion.
I glanced back. The urgency in his eyes was foreign—I had never been the recipient of such intensity. I nodded once, saying nothing, and slowed my pace just enough for him to keep up.
Speed was the priority. We flew.
Seventy years on this earth, and I had never set foot on a plane. Years ago, when Elijah was still whole, he had promised me a trip.
"When I retire," he'd said with that rare, charming smile that used to make my knees weak, "we'll go far away. I'll show you the world from above the clouds."
He kept his promise. But the cruel irony was that my first flight wasn't a vacation—it was a mission to reunite my husband with another woman.
The engines roared to life, drowning out the cabin, but they couldn't drown out the memories drifting back from decades ago.
Elijah came from nothing. His family was destitute, unable to scrape together tuition for his studies. Amy's family was in the same boat—too poor to support his ambition to take the college entrance exam.
Faced with a choice between love and his future, Elijah chose himself. He broke up with Amy decisively.
By the time I entered the picture, introduced by relatives, I knew the history. I was the safe choice. The stable choice.
He chose me, I had told myself back then. He gave up the past. If I just love him enough, if I treat him with sincerity, we will have a good life.
I was young. I was foolish.
The two-hour flight passed in a blur of gray clouds and bitter reflection. As the plane taxied down the runway, the landscape shifting from abstract mist to concrete reality, a new thought took root.
If I ever fly again, it will be for me.
The moment we landed, Elijah snatched the paper from my hand. He moved with frantic energy I hadn't seen in decades—stopping strangers, shoving the address in their faces, demanding directions to the village.
I watched him, a bitter taste in my mouth.
From the day I married him, I had carried the weight of our existence. I nursed his parents on their deathbeds. I managed the finances, the repairs, the children's fevers, their schooling. I was the foundation of the Henson family.
He had been a guest in his own home.
Even on the day I went into labor, he told me he had a "critical project meeting." He arrived three hours after our son was born, smelling of office coffee and indifference.
But now? For a woman he hadn't seen in fifty years, he couldn't bear to waste a single second.
We found our way to the village, and the local gossip painted a grim picture before we even reached her door.
After Elijah abandoned her, Amy didn't wait long. She married a man from the same village.
Whatever dreams she had died there. Her husband was a brute—violent, using his fists to settle arguments and his voice to demean. For twenty years, she served as his punching bag and pack mule, taking on heavy labor until she was broken in both body and spirit.
