**Diary Entry – 15th June**
I set the table, lit the candles, and placed his favourite roast chicken at the centre. Everything was meant to feel like something from a film—fifty years together, a golden anniversary, half a lifetime spent side by side. Five decades of marriage—joy, family holidays, raising children, summers away, arguments, and reconciliations. I’d thought we’d weathered it all and come out stronger. I was certain we loved each other. At least, I knew *I* did.
We’d agreed to spend the evening alone. The children and grandchildren had sent cards, calls, and warm messages, but we wanted quiet. I wanted to believe we weren’t just growing old together—we were still *together*.
William sat across from me. He seemed calm, but there was something odd in his eyes. I assumed he was moved—fifty years is no small thing. I raised my glass and smiled.
“William, thank you for these years. I can’t imagine my life without you.”
He looked down. The silence that followed was the thick, heavy kind that presses on your chest. He didn’t answer. Just waited. And then he lifted his gaze—and in it was something I’d never seen before: deep sorrow, more guilt than pain.
“Margaret, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve carried all this time…”
My heart stopped. Fear gripped me. A thousand thoughts raced—illness? Something serious?
“I should’ve told you sooner. But I couldn’t. Now I see I have to. Because you deserve the truth. I… I never loved you.”
Time froze. My breath vanished, my hands shook, my eyes burned with tears. I stared, waiting for him to say, *Only joking.* But he wasn’t joking.
“What did you say?” I whispered, already feeling a tear roll down my cheek. “How can you? Fifty years… We shared fifty years.”
“I respected you. You’re a good, kind woman. But I married for convenience. Back then, it seemed the right thing. We were young—everyone did it. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Then the children came, the routine set in, the years passed. I just… lived.”
He wouldn’t look at me. Couldn’t.
The words I’d built my life on had turned to dust. Every shared breakfast, evening stroll, midnight conversation in the kitchen—now they felt like scenes from someone else’s play. We buried his mother together, celebrated our grandchildren’s births, holidayed in Cornwall. Could all of that really have been without love?
“Why tell me now?” My voice trembled, but I forced the words out. “Why not ten, twenty years ago?”
“Because I can’t keep lying. It’s crushing me. And you—you shouldn’t live a lie. You deserve the truth, even now.”
That night, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. He slept on the sofa. For the first time in fifty years, I felt I didn’t know him. Worse—I didn’t know who *I* was beside him.
The days after, I avoided him. My heart ached with fury and grief. He tried to talk, saying that despite everything, I’d been his family—that he stayed because leaving wasn’t an option. That he remained because he couldn’t imagine life without me.
“Margaret, even without love, you were the closest person to me. I couldn’t abandon you,” he murmured one evening.
Those words were like a bandage on a wound—no cure, just something to dull the pain. I don’t know how to live with this truth. How to sit at the same table again. How to face tomorrow.
But I do know this: those fifty years weren’t just his lie. They were my truth. My life. My motherhood. My love. Even if what I got in return wasn’t love—just presence. Even if there was loneliness beneath it all—on the surface, I *lived*. I loved. I built. I believed.
I don’t know if I’ll forgive. But I won’t forget. And one day, perhaps, I’ll accept it. Because, hard as it is to say, my life isn’t defined by his confession. Those were *my* years. *My* heart. *My* story.
**Lesson:** Love, even unreturned, still shapes us. And a lifetime of devotion—no matter the truth behind it—is never wasted.
