Always second choice

1

LUCIEN

I am dying, and with what little time I have left, I want to do one final thing right. I want to reunite my wife with her true love.

You know those stories. Epic loves torn apart by fate, only to find each other again when the time is right. The kind of love that becomes a single name, spoken as one. Romeo and Juliet. Jack and Rose. Heer and Ranjha.

That kind of love was never meant to be mine.

I am not the lead in my wife's story. I never was. Whenever her name is spoken, people already know the man who holds her heart, and it isn't me.

That truth used to hurt more than I can explain. Because she is the love of my life. She is the center of my story, the answer to every prayer I ever whispered into the dark. Loving her has been the greatest privilege of my existence, even if I was never her epic.

But today, that truth no longer wounds me.

Today, it brings me peace.

Because after I am gone, I can leave her where she belongs, back in the arms of the man who was always meant to walk beside her. She will not be alone. She will not grow old wrapped in grief. She will have someone to laugh with, to build a life with, to hold her hand when the world grows quiet.

Yes, my skin still prickles at the thought of another man holding her the way I once did. Kissing her soft lips. Learning the curves of her body as if they were sacred ground. That jealousy is human. It is love refusing to die quietly.

But circumstances have decided my ending for me. And maybe this, this sacrifice, is the role I was meant to play.

Not her forever.

But the man who gives her one.

I am Lucien. A dying husband on a mission to give the woman I love her happily ever after.