Maybe I cried because, though I had a plan, I secretly prayed he would thwart it. Perhaps I half-envisioned me leaving him, chin held high as I walked away, and half-envisioned him begging me to stay, promising to relinquish his love affair, for our marriage meant more to him than she ever could.

Regardless, it didn’t matter now.

Now, I had a cheating husband who would never learn my knowledge of his infidelity.

Because now, I would never tell him I knew.

What would be the objective? With a blow as hard as terminal cancer, was there really any point to leaving him now, to letting him fight the final weeks of his life alone? Was there any point to telling him I knew about the other woman he touched, other than satisfying my need to feel in control, to shove my proof in his face and say Ha! I know what you did!?

Death has a funny way of putting life into perspective for us. And what had once been so important to me — that need for vindication I held so tightly on my drive home — didn’t seem to matter now. There was really only one thing that did.

I loved him.

That emotion was easy to pin down.

And because it was the only thing I could truly grasp, I held onto it tightly, knuckles white and aching. Carlo Mancini was my husband, and I, his wife. He was my everything — and that was still true, regardless of who else he’d shared a bed with.

So, I pulled back from his embrace, and kissed his lips — lips I always thought would be only mine to kiss — and I told him I loved him. I told him I was there. I held his hand and told him that, come what may, he had me by his side.

And by his side I stayed, until the very day he died.

Somewhere in that warped, whirling span of time, I think a part of me died, too.

I watched cancer wither my strong, commanding husband into nothing but skin and bones. I watched his eyes grow hollow, his lips ashen, his hands weaken where I held them in mine. Every day that I looked in the mirror, I watched my own eyes change, a hardness settling in. I watched a twenty-nine-year-old girl become an old woman in just weeks — weeks that felt like years, but flew by like days.

And on the day of his funeral, I watched a girl younger and prettier than me mourn him from the back row of our church.