As rain lashes the windows of a hospital room, Jane stands at her husband Robert's bedside, counting each shallow breath and feeling time narrow to the space between heartbeats. The room smells of antiseptic and endings, and the man she has loved for decades is fading?his once-strong hands now frail, his touch more memory than presence.

While she waits, Jane's mind drifts backward. She remembers the girl she was at sixteen, expelled from school and home in a single afternoon, marked by shame and rejection, learning to survive by refusing regret. That hard-won defiance became both her armour and her flaw, shaping the woman Robert would later love?steadfastly, imperfectly, without demanding explanations she wasn't ready to give.

Through fragments of shared history?stolen moments of laughter, reckless youth, fierce arguments, and quiet tenderness?Jane measures the life they built together. She recalls Paris in the rain, stolen oranges, sex that felt like survival, and the steady weight of Robert's presence in a world that had taught her not to trust it. These memories collide with the present: the machines' soft beeping, the chill of the room, the knowledge that there will be no more shared tomorrows.

As Robert weakens, Jane grapples with everything left unsaid?apologies withheld, fears buried, love expressed more through habit and touch than words. The past she once swallowed down now rises, inseparable from the man she is about to lose. Outside, the rain stops, the garden lifts its head, and life insists on continuing.

Tender, raw, and intimate, this story explores love at its quietest and most devastating moment, where memory becomes both refuge and wound, and saying goodbye means finally allowing regret, grief, and love to exist together.