I'm sitting in the kitchen at 2:14 AM listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the heavy, rattling breathing of a man who doesn't even know my name anymore. My husband. The "brilliant" architect I married forty years ago is now a shell, and I am the only one left to hold the pieces. Everyone says I’m so strong. "You're a rock, Diane," they say. I want to throw a rock through their front windows. I spent twenty-five years at the firm. I billable-houred my soul into a fine gray powder so we could have the summer house and the prestige and the "Senior Partner" title on the door. And for what? For this? I look at my hands in this dim light and I don't see a "distinguished" lawyer. I see a servant. I see someone who spends their retirement years wiping up spilled soup and arguing with insurance companies that don't give a damn about the law. I used to win cases that made the front page of the Ledger. I used to walk into a boardroom and everyone would stop talking just to hear my opinion. Now? Now I’m just the person who remembers the medication schedule. I’m the one who handles the diapers. Me. The Great Litigator. What a f***ing joke. And here’s the kicker... I’m starting to think I never even liked the law. I didn't care about the statutes or the precedents. I liked the money. I liked the way people shrunk a little when I told them what I did for a living. I liked the expensive wool suits that felt like armor. It was an ego trip that lasted two decades and cost me every ounce of actual personality I might have had. I was a shark in a three-piece suit and now I’m just a ghost in a floral bathrobe. I spent my life fighting for people I didn't like just to prove I was the smartest person in the room. My kids call once a week to "check in." That's the highlight of their effort. "How's Dad?" they ask. Like he’s a weather report. They don't ask how I am. They don't ask about the fact that I haven't slept more than four hours in a row since 2019. They just assume I've got it under control because I’ve ALWAYS had it under control. I was the one who paid for the schools. I was the one who fixed the legal messes when their friends got caught with things they shouldn't have. I was the fixer. So now, I’m the caregiver. It’s expected. It’s my job. GOD I am so tired of being useful. Do you have any idea what that’s like? To be valued only for what you can DO, not who you are? But then, who am I? I don't know. I’m a collection of billable hours and medical directives. I’m a bank account and a pair of steady hands. I look at the trophies in the den—the "Lawyer of the Year" plaques—and I want to melt them down. They represent twenty years of missing dinners and ignoring my own life for a career that left me with nothing but the ability to read a contract and a deep, burning resentment for every person who ever looked up to me. People talk about the "golden years." What a load of SHIT. There is nothing golden about watching the person you love disappear while you lose yourself in the process. I’m seventy-one years old. I should be on a boat. I should be reading the books I bought twenty years ago and never opened. Instead, I’m listening for a thump in the next room. I’m waiting for the next crisis. I’m trapped in this house, trapped in this role, and trapped in the realization that I spent my best years chasing a ghost of a career that I didn't even enjoy. I see my former colleagues on social media. Posting about their "legacy." Their "impact." SHUT UP. You didn't impact anything. You moved money from one pile to another and called it a life. We all did. We traded our time for a title and now look at us. Half of them are dead from heart attacks and the other half are as miserable as I am, they just won't admit it. They’re still out there playing the game, pretending the law matters. It doesn't. Not when you're facing the end. Not when you're the one holding the towel. I’m angry. I’m bitter. And you know what? I’m allowed to be. I earned this bitterness. I paid for it with sixty-hour work weeks and a thousand missed memories. I paid for it by being the "dependable" one while everyone else got to have a "personality." If one more person tells me I’m doing a "noble thing" by staying here and rotting alongside my husband, I’m going to lose it. It’s not noble. It’s a prison. And I’m the one who built the bars out of prestige and high-interest savings accounts. The sun is going to come up in a few hours. I’ll make the coffee. I’ll crush the pills. I’ll put on the face of the competent, retired professional who has it all figured out. I’ll play the part because that’s all I know how to do. I’ll be the lawyer. I’ll be the wife. I’ll be the caregiver. But inside? Inside I am screaming. I am clawing at the walls of this life I chose and I hate every single brick of it. Every. Single. One. Maybe I should have been a gardener. Or a carpenter. Something real.