**Diary Entry**
The hospital corridors had become familiar to Charlesyet never comforting. Each visit left him drained, irritable, and further detached from his own life.
He always took the stairs. Not for fitness, but to avoid pitying glances and hollow pleasantries.
Today, he carried a small bouquet of white roses. For appearances. His wife, Eleanor, had been in a coma for weeksshe wouldnt see them, wouldnt feel them. But the flowers reassured the others: doctors, family. He played his partthe devoted husband.
Beneath the façade, though, everything was crumbling. The care costs were bleeding him dry. Days slipped by; bills piled up. And Charlessilent, stretched thincouldnt bear it any longer.
Somewhere deep, hed already let go. Guilt gnawed at him: *What if Eleanor never woke up?* Hed inherit everything. A monstrous thought and yet, strangely liberating.
That day, he entered her room, set the roses in a vaseand whispered something.
Minutes later, he regretted those words bitterly. Heres why:
*”Eleanor I never loved you the way you believed. This is destroying me. If you were gone it would be easier.”*
What Charles didnt know: just beneath the bed crouched Emily, a young volunteer. Shed hidden there to escape her own emotional breakdownand now overheard a devastating truth.
When Eleanors father, William, arrived shortly after, Charles slipped his mask back on. He spoke tenderly, soothingly. But William sensed it at oncesomething was wrong.
Emily faced a choice: speak up and risk everything, or stay silent and let worse unfold.
In the end, she spoke.
*”He wished she would die,”* she told William.
He frozebut he wasnt surprised.
By the next day, a plan was in place: Charles was never to be alone with Eleanor again.
When he returned, the shift was palpablesuspicious glances, constant supervision. And Williams icy warning:
*”One mistake and you lose everything.”*
Charles tried to keep up the act. Until the day Eleanor stirred. A twitch, a flutter of her lashes She was coming back.
And in that moment, everything changed. Memories of her, their shared years, her laughter flooded him. Shame followed.
He stayed. Day after day. Not out of dutybut because he meant it.
When she finally left the hospital, she murmured, *”You stayed. Thank you.”*
His voice thickened. *”Im sorry it took me so long to understand what truly matters.”*
No one knew what the future held. But instead of bitterness, something real took root between them. Fragile. Honest. A second chance.
