Chapter 18 - Unsent Confessions
The final piece of closure came unexpectedly a few weeks after my birthday.
I decided it was time to sell the house I had once shared with Mark.
It held too many dark memories of his lies and Eleanor's constant criticisms.
I spent a weekend packing up the last of his belongings into cardboard boxes.
I donated his expensive clothes to a local charity and threw away his personal items.
While clearing out the back of his closet, I found a small, locked wooden box.
I used a hammer to smash the cheap lock open, curious about what else he had hidden.
Inside were a series of unsent letters written in Mark's messy handwriting.
They were addressed to me, dated a few weeks before the fatal crash.
In the letters, he admitted how deeply unhappy he was with his own double life.
He wrote about the crushing pressure of Eleanor's gambling debts and his own cowardice.
He admitted that he ruined our marriage because he was too weak to be a good man.
He never apologized, but he acknowledged exactly what he had destroyed.
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I read the letters once, standing in the middle of the empty bedroom.
Then, I struck a match and burned them in the fireplace until they were nothing but ashes.
