The Half a Million Pounds Wife
If happiness has a price, in any currency, it’s zero.
A friend’s death shocked me into leaving my first husband. Adrian was a seemingly healthy man in his early thirties, recently engaged to another friend who invented the best banana cake recipe in all human history. A few weeks before their wedding, he unexpectedly collapsed while walking their dog on Eastbourne seafront. Rushed to hospital in an ambulance, he was told he had an undiagnosed heart condition and would need an angiogram to discover exactly what was going on. This involved injecting dye into an artery, something normally done under local anaesthetic. Adrian had a needle phobia, so he asked for a general, and they obliged.
He never surfaced. His funeral was held at the church where they would have been married. Their reception venue hosted the wake. All the men wore cartoon ties at his fiancée’s request.
Standing in the church pew singing a funeral hymn next to the husband I no longer loved, I suddenly realised…
