It was disbelief.
Susan?
The girl who, when we were twelve, had gotten into a fight at school because someone insulted me?
The woman who stood beside me on my wedding day?
The woman who hugged me when I lost my first baby?
The woman who spent the entire night with me in the hospital when Michael had to undergo heart surgery?
She had known all along?
I grabbed my phone and called her.
It was turned off.
I called again.
Nothing.
So I continued reading.
Michael wrote that after eight months, he was the one who ended the relationship.
According to him, Susan already wanted to tell me the whole truth.
Michael had begged her not to.
He wrote:
“If we had told you the truth, I would have lost you, and you would have lost your husband and your best friend at the same time.”
That sentence made me even angrier.
They had made the decision for me.
They had even decided how much pain I was allowed to know.
Then I reached the hardest part.
Over the years, Susan had tried several times to leave my life.
And suddenly, I remembered.
Once, without any explanation, she told me she wanted to move to another state.
I cried.
I told her:
“I’m not going to let you leave. You’re my family.”
She stayed.
Now I understood why she had hugged me for so long that day.
Another time, she stopped coming to our house for months.
I got angry and forced her to explain what was going on.
She told me she was simply very busy with work.
It was a lie.
She was trying to distance herself from me.
And every time, I pulled her back into my life.
At the end of the letter, Michael wrote that after he was diagnosed with cancer, he had made Susan promise that she would tell me the whole truth after his death.
I knew nothing about it.
During the last few weeks of his life, Michael often spoke privately with Susan.
I thought he was asking her to take care of me after he was gone.s
It turned out he was actually asking her to finally stop lying to me.
I was still reading when someone knocked on the door.
It was Susan.
She hadn’t run away.
She had simply spent the entire morning sitting in the café across from the hotel.
