Regret Comes LateChapter 1

Alexa, my wife of six years, was affectionately nicknamed "Husband Worshiper" by her colleagues and students.

As a university professor, she was renowned not only for her academic prowess but also for her steadfast devotion to me. She never attended social gatherings, always preferring to spend her evenings with me. When male students dared to ask for her contact information, she would turn them down with a tone so cold it could frost over. "Sorry, I have a husband," she'd reply, as if that explained everything.

Her colleagues loved to tease her, saying she had set a new bar for modern love stories. Among her published academic works was a singular outlier—a book titled Confessions of Love. It wasn't meant for the academic world. It was meant for me. Our love story, lauded across Carbel University, was held up as a modern fairy tale.

But yesterday, I stumbled upon something that cracked the perfection of that story. I was tidying up the bookshelf in our study—a task Alexa usually insisted on doing herself—when I discovered it. Hidden between the pages of one of her older books was a photo.