Maplewood was still the same town on the outside—quiet, slow, predictable. But for Mary Jamesson, everything had changed. Her illness still baffled doctors, but her clarity about William, about their marriage, was no longer cloudy. Whether he stayed or left, whether he returned with apologies or disappeared completely—Mary knew she had already survived the worst of it.
Because the deepest pain wasn’t in the diagnosis, but in the silence of the man who once called her his world.
And still, she breathed.
She fought.
She lived.