MY HUSBAND RAISED HIS CHAMPAGNE GLASS AND TOLD ME TO DIE QUIETLY, COMPLETELY CERTAIN HE WAS READING MY CANCER RESULTS—UNTIL I SAID, “CHECK THE PATIENT’S NAME, YOU IDIOT.”

Two weeks later, the legal separation and asset reallocation were finalized with terrifying, surgical efficiency.

Richard’s high-society friends, investment banking peers, and club associates had already distanced themselves from him the moment the corporate scandal hit the financial press. His mistress—the glamorous twenty-something socialite he had planned to whisk away to Paris—had vanished the moment his credit cards were declined and his name was scrubbed from the Forbes executive directory.

He was left entirely alone in his glass-and-steel mansion, cared for by a rotating shift of clinical nurses he couldn't even look in the eye.

I was sitting in a sunlit corner booth of a quiet downtown café, reviewing structural engineering schematics for my newly registered architectural firm, Valente Design Group, when my phone chimed.

It was an automated notification from an airline app linked to an old shared credit card account that hadn't been fully deactivated.

Transaction Alert: One-way first-class ticket to Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris. Passenger: Richard Vance.

I stared at the screen for a long moment.

Even at the end, even with his cognitive faculties beginning to fray under the relentless advance of his terminal illness, he was still chasing the exact same shallow, selfish fantasy. He was running away to a city he had never truly appreciated, trying to buy an escape from a reality he couldn't architect.

I locked my phone, silenced the notification, and slid the device face down onto the wooden table.

Let him go to Paris. Let him sit in a grand café watching strangers walk by, realizing too late that all the money in the world couldn't buy him another hour of clarity, another genuine smile, or a single person who cared whether he lived or died.