In Health

I know that I am hurting you right now. I wish there had been another way. I hope that with time you will think fondly of me. I will always think that way of you. You were always the rock that I could count on. I only wish that I could have been the same for you.

With gratitude and sadness,

Chloe

"Forever" didn't even last two years.

I sat there for I don't know how long. The sun was high in the sky when I could process the world around me again. There were tears on my face, and my palms bled from the deep cuts my nails had scratched in them.

"You fucking bitch!" I roared with anger as I stood, flipping the table over. Like a wild, injured beast, I careened from room to room, breaking anything I could, smashing our wedding china, overturning tables and chairs, causing more wounds on my hands as I shattered picture frames with barehanded punches. When my energy deserted me, long before my rage had, I sat in the wreckage of our home, the wreckage of my life, and sobbed.

I was bleeding heavily by then. Not life-threateningly, I didn't think, but enough that I knew I needed treatment. I called the only people left that I could depend on. "Katrina?" My voice was almost too weak to hear.

"Nate? What's wrong?"

"Help. Please, Kat. Help." And then I passed out.

I woke in the hospital; she and Dale had gotten me there. The damage wasn't too extensive, but I would need stitches. My friends thought, at first, that I had been the victim of a home invasion. They believed that Chloe was on a business trip, and someone had broken in and ransacked the place. But when I could speak, I told them the truth.

They couldn't believe it at first. It was such a shocking betrayal, and completely out of tune with what they knew of her. But once they had me back home, I was able to find the letter and the envelopes in the debris scattered around my kitchen. Katrina shouted, "That cunt! How could she?!"

As Katrina ranted and raved, Dale just sat with me, quietly supporting me with his presence. It was a reversal of their usual personalities, adding a little bit of surreality to the proceedings. When Kat finally calmed down, she went and packed a bag for me; there was no way they were going to leave me alone in the shape that either I or the house was in.

Dale drove me in my car back to their home while Kat stayed behind to straighten up. She told me later that she had tried to call Chloe's cell to give her a very large and exceedingly angry piece of her mind, but my soon-to-be ex-wife had already canceled her service.

I stayed with them for a few months, only occasionally going back to the house to salvage a few personal items: my clothing, computers, and a few other necessities. Chloe had understated the severity of our financial distress; I had planned to talk with her about declaring bankruptcy a few weeks after our anniversary, not wanting to taint the celebration with bad news. That had worked out wonderfully for me.

When the dust finally settled, we were left destitute and with completely wrecked credit. Chloe already had her new rented apartment and company car out in LA, and the bankruptcy touched neither. She could just carry on her life out there away from me.

I was so lost when she left that I hadn't even started trying to get an apartment before proceeding with the bankruptcy; getting a new place was going to cost me far more than just first and last month's rent and a security deposit. I kept the wheelchair accessible van in the bankruptcy; it went to a family that needed it in a straight trade for their slightly newer sedan, and they cried with joy. I had saved them tens of thousands of dollars. It felt good to do something for people that actually appreciated it.

Katrina and Dale were both worried about me; I would have been, too, but I couldn't even summon up the energy for that. I spiraled into a deep, dark depression. None of it had mattered. None of my life had mattered, my compassion, my preparation or sacrifice. My wife had lived, I had kept her alive and gotten her into treatment and stayed by her side through everything, and all I got in exchange was the equivalent of an attaboy followed by a cosmic-level "fuck you."

Being around my friends hurt. I tried to not think about what could have been; not what could have been with Chloe, because it was quite clear now that that never could have been. She was too much of a narcissistic bitch. But when I saw Katrina and Dale exchange little kisses and winks, the tiny affections between two people grateful for the second chance that fate had granted them, I'm ashamed to admit that I wished it was me with Kat instead.

That had been the plan. That's what I had prepared for, even if only subconsciously. One day, Dale and Chloe would be gone, and Kat and I would be together. Maybe. Possibly. But that wasn't going to happen now. I watched the second woman that I'd ever loved in the arms of another man, of my best friend, and I couldn't decide which hurt worse: that I was alone, or that she was not.

I tried to hide it; I was so grateful to them for how they'd picked me up and helped me at the worst time in my life. "The worst time in my life;" funny how new ones of those kept coming along. But they were my dearest friends, and they knew my moods. There was no way I could hide the pain from them. I just tried to pretend that it was about Chloe. It didn't work.

One night, Dale and I were sitting around. He was trying to keep my mind off my things, playing videogames; now that he had his strength and motor control back, he was trying to catch up on years of classics that he never got to play. It was a good way to distract myself, so I went along. But on this night, as with most nights in the recent few weeks, it just wasn't working.

He tentatively said, "I know that you and Katrina... you had plans for what was going to happen after."

"After?"

"If... when Chloe and I didn't get better. Before CRISPR."

Ah. "Not plans, really. Just... We didn't think that far ahead. Just trying to put one foot in front of the other."

He chuckled. "Katrina did. She and I talked about it, and I gave my blessing." He looked away. "And I can't imagine you, the king of preparation, didn't at least think about it."

Slowly, I said. "I'm glad that... that as bad as things turned out for me, I'm glad you two are together. That they've worked out for you." I was. It hurt, but Kat was happy, and Dale was happy. Even if I was left holding the bag, I still couldn't wish them anything but well.

He smiled. "They have. But..." Dale still wouldn't look at me. "But the offer still stands. Not... not... I couldn't have Kat leave me, but if she and you..." He finally looked at me. "Without you, we wouldn't be together. Without your support, we might not have even made it as far as CRISPR. She was dying inside before you came into her life. I don't know if she would have been able to stay with me until the end. If... if that offer would be of comfort to you now, if being with her, physically, would..." He swallowed. "It's okay."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "What?"

Dale nodded. "I... She loves you as much as she loves me. I know that. And I know that... that we both owe you so much. I love you, too, man. You're like the brother I never had. And every good thing you've done has made you less happy, and I just... neither of us can stand that."

"Dale, I can't--"

Shaking his head, he continued. "I don't want to know. When it happens, I mean. I've already talked to Kat; she knows you have my blessing. But I just... don't tell me about it, okay? I know you won't try to take her from me, that..." He stopped, finding it difficult to finish the sentence. "It's okay. If something happens with you two, it does. We wouldn't have each other without you. It won't hurt us, not really. I promise."

My friend left the room, pain and resolve warring on his face. I sat there, mind whirling, until I finally stood, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

Nothing happened for a few weeks. It wasn't discussed again, either between Dale and me or Katrina and me. I tried to treat it as a blip, a heartfelt outpouring of love and gratitude that I would never actually follow up on. He loved me enough to offer it; I loved him enough to not pursue it.

But that détente was broken unexpectedly early one Saturday afternoon. My back was bothering me again; it had never entirely stopped. Dale was out of the house, off with his cycling group, probably until dinnertime. Katrina saw me favoring one side.

"Need a massage?" I opened my mouth to respond, but Dale's offer made me pause. Kat hadn't given me one since Dale and I had spoken that night. She chuckled. "It's just a massage, Nate. It doesn't have to be anything more than that." I blushed, which made her laugh. "Come on, you know the drill."

I disrobed in private, wrapping a towel around my waist before climbing up onto the massage bench. She entered afterwards. I was face down and couldn't see her, but I knew she had changed, too. That wasn't out of the ordinary; she often changed to avoid getting massage oil on her clothes.

I was sleepy before she even began; there was a Pavlovian association between laying there and the relaxation I knew would soon come. As she rubbed the oil into my back, I could smell the aroma, a pleasant floral scent with a hint of lilacs. "God, your hands are amazing, Kat."

She chuckled, "Just relax and enjoy." And so I did. She worked at the muscles of my back, kneading the knots and loosening them. I knew that I was carrying a lot of stress; it would be hard not to, given everything that had happened to me. Kat had been giving me massages for years now, and she knew where my rough spots would be. I think that by the end she knew my body better than Chloe; all the parts of me save one.

Katrina knelt on my legs, and I knew something was different. I couldn't place it immediately, as relaxed and untethered from my body as I was, but then it struck me: her legs were bare. Not wearing shorts, not in yoga pants or sweats, but bare. There was the thinnest, narrowest piece of cloth separating her from me, and I could feel the heat radiating from it. "Kat..."

"Shh, Nate. Just relax." She kept working at my back and then my arms as if nothing was different. I tried to relax again, tried to convince myself that it was nothing more than her having grown more comfortable with me as we had lived together. Yeah. It didn't ring true to me, either.

But it wasn't until she told me to turn over that I knew, for certain, that she wasn't just trying to give me one of the innocent therapeutic massages that she had before. She was wearing barely anything at all; nothing but panties below the waist, as I knew, but only a short, thin robe above it. It was closed with a loose tie, but her ample breasts were still almost spilling out of it.

"Kat, we can't."

She smiled down at me, raven hair spilling down over her shoulders, blue eyes sparkling with moisture. Her manner was kind but insistent. "We can, Nate. It's okay. I love you. Let me show you, please." Her hand hovered over my towel; I didn't stop her.

When it came away, she chuckled. "I was worried that you just weren't attracted to me; guess not."

My hand reached for her face, stroked her cheek. "No, Kat. You're beautiful. And... god, so sexy." The woman that I loved, that I shouldn't but did, blushed at this, at the wonder in my voice, the yearning in my eyes. I wanted her so badly.

Katrina kissed my hand, then leaned low over me. Her slender fingers gripped my cock, and a voice in my head started to shout in warning. She licked her ruby lips, then opened them wide and moved her head to take me someplace I'd longed to go for the better part of a decade. My breath shuddered from my body with a deep and heartfelt need. She would bring me to the heights of ecstasy, I was certain.

I closed my eyes, trying to quiet the voices in my head. It had the opposite effect. I loved Kat. I wanted her so much, to take her and claim her as mine. But she wasn't mine, and she never would be. She was Dale's, and I knew that this would destroy them, no matter what they'd each said.

If things had gone as we'd expected, before the treatments, I would have loved her for the rest of our days. I knew that now, as sure as I'd ever known anything. But they didn't. And because I loved her, and I loved him, and I loved them--

"No." It was the hardest thing I'd ever say, that single, solitary word.

She stopped. "Nate?"

"No, Kat. We can't. I won't." Sitting up, I pushed her upright as well. "I want to, Kat. I want this so badly it hurts. I want you. I love you, too, as much... no, more than I've ever loved anyone. If... if things were different, yes, I'd..." I chuckled. "Well, best to not be too specific. But I'd love you forever." Her eyes, already moist, began to shed tears, a glittering trickle of grief on that loveliest of faces. I gently wiped them away.

The word came out hoarse with sadness and frustrated desire. "Why?"

I smiled sadly. "You know why."

Kat shook her head. "He said it was okay. We talked about it. We love you, we both do. It doesn't have to be..."

I kissed her softly and lovingly, a dream fulfilled, then pulled back. "What did you feel?" The woman I loved looked away, her face etched with shame. "There's no way this would work; we both know that."

She closed her eyes and unhappily nodded. It was too much. We would be too much. Too much to restrict to the merely physical. Too much for her marriage to survive. She didn't love me more than him; I had to cling to that belief in order to stay strong. And I loved them both. I wanted them both to be happy. Which meant, once more, that I had to suffer alone.

We talked with Dale before I left. I made it clear to him that it was a mutual decision, that we had gone no further than the briefest of temptations. The relief on his face and hers showed me I'd made the right decision. They helped me pack my car and hugged me closely, all of us barely suppressing tears as we said goodbye. I cursed the lessons of my father, the asinine notion that kindness cost nothing, as I left behind the last people that I loved.

A new city. A new job. A new life that I hoped against hope would be better than my old one. A new future, with nothing remaining from my past but misery: the betrayal of the woman I married; the heartbreaking disappointment that I could never be with the one I loved.

With any other comfort denied to me, I wallowed in dark places. I spent the first year after my move obsessing over my ex-wife, trying to find ways to cause her pain and derail her life the way she had mine, with some limited success.

There was a rumor that she was going to be one of the faces of the marketing campaign for the treatment that had saved her life and ruined mine. The letter she had left me was disseminated far and wide; I paid a search engine optimisation firm to make sure that it would show up in the first ten results when searching for her name. That spokesperson job never happened, and her public speaking gigs seemed to dry up, too.

Outside of that, though, there was little I could do. I kept an eye out for news of her, occasionally checking her social media. When she announced her engagement to a venture capitalist, I made sure he got a copy of the letter. They were married regardless, so it didn't have the intended effect. I did note with glee that they divorced within a couple of years, and that he had cheated on her.

There was some cruel comfort in later years that what happened to me was by no means rare. The wags called us "CRISPR Widows," a group of longsuffering spouses, mostly women, that were abandoned by their partners when the treatments returned the strength that they'd lost years or decades before.

The typical scenario, the one that made up the majority of cases, was much like Chloe's, sort of a midlife crisis on steroids. Men who had missed out on the vigor of youth and suddenly had a facsimile of it given to them years after the fact decided en masse to abandon the women that had given their youth and health to take care of them.

As with many things, however, there was more nuance than this simple scenario. Sometimes the dissolution of the relationship was more like that which many empty nesters suffered; without the common foe of the disease to hold them together, they found themselves drifting apart. Or sometimes it was the caregiver-- long unhappy in their relationship but staying out of a sense of duty-- that decided they had fully discharged it and left.

It became so bad that a more clinical name was given to the phenomena, and part of the protocol for administering the various CRISPR cures was mandatory family counseling. It was much too late to help me, but I was glad to know that what had befallen my marriage might be averted in others.

It was a dozen years before I saw Chloe in person again and for the last time. In one of my increasingly infrequent scans of her social media pages, I learned that she had terminal and inoperable cancer. I reached out to her, finally taking myself off of the radio silence I'd held since our divorce. Her response was immediate, a plea that I come visit at her expense.

The little things had gotten her again: a quickly glossed over warning about increased cancer risk from CRISPR; a persistent cough ignored; the tiniest black spot on an X-ray that grew and spread before it was found. If she had never left me, I would have kept on her to make sure she got the additional screenings that she needed. Now, she would die alone and unloved.

It was a thousand mile journey to the final meeting that she, in her cowardice, had denied me when she left. I ignored her offer to pay, choosing to do this on my own terms. Upon reaching the correct floor at the hospice, I stopped, took a few deep breaths to steady myself, and knocked on her door.

Chloe was almost unrecognizable. Even in the worst days of her fight with muscular dystrophy, she hadn't looked this weakened or pained. Death hovered over her, a companion that I was certain would take her to journey with him not long after I left.

"Nate." A feeble smile lit up her face. "Thank you. Thank you--" She coughed. "-- for coming to see me. I..." She wheezed a bit more, reaching toward a small cup next to her bed.

I limped over to her on a cane, a cheap, scratched up hollow rod of metal with tape on the handle. My clothes, out of date, stained, and threadbare, hung loosely off my frame, and she looked at me with sadness and alarm as I came closer.

There were ice chips in her cup; I took one out and placed it at her lips. My ex-wife took it into her mouth with a grateful sigh. We had never reached this stage before the treatments cured her, but I knew the rhythms and patterns of end of life care from the friends that passed before the miracle could save them.

There was a chair next to her bed, and I sat, taking the strain off my back with a soft groan. She spoke again. "I... Nate, I owe you..." A soft, wheezing chuckle that turned into a coughing fit. "I owe you more than I could ever say. But most of all, I owe you an apology."

I shook my head. "No. No, Chloe, you owe me twenty years of my life back. But I guess I'll never get that, will I?" I didn't bother to disguise my rancor; I think that surprised her. The very ill are so rarely subjected to the venom of others, even when they so richly deserve it.

Slowly speaking once more, Chloe continued, "I know. If things... if they could be different, if I could make them different, I would. Please, believe me, I would."

"Easy to say now."

She sniffled. "Please, Nathan. You've always been so kind. I need--"

"I don't give a flying fuck what you need." My ex-wife recoiled slightly. "I'm not kind or compassionate. I can't be anymore. You took my compassion, Chloe, you took it and you killed it. You killed me with it."