Five Years of Substitute Love,He Departed

For five years, she quietly filled the place of the woman he could not forget, offering him every bit of her tenderness and devotion as his stand-in first love. The arrangement held her heart in a fragile balance, since she gave everything while knowing she was never the one he truly wanted. Her steady affection kept them together, but the longer the pretense lasted, the harder it became for her to keep pretending it cost her nothing.