Long after our separation, my former wife returned with a request I never expected

Eighteen years earlier, on a rainy autumn night that smelled faintly of cold pavement and unfinished conversations, Mark’s life changed forever.

He had been holding his newborn twin daughters—tiny, warm, fragile—when Lauren, his wife at the time, closed the apartment door behind her and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway.

She left no argument, no tears, no final embrace. Only a handwritten note taped to the kitchen table, its ink slightly smudged by what Mark always believed were raindrops…

though a part of him wondered if perhaps they had been tears.

The note said little. Only that she needed to follow her ambitions, that she wasn’t meant for the life they had built, and that she couldn’t carry the weight of responsibility anymore.

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