Anna lived in a white room. The walls were white, the furniture was white, and the light that filtered through the blinds was a sterile, bleached grey. She liked it this way. It minimized the noise.

Ben had been the only splash of color in her life. Or so she had told herself for the three years since his death. She had spent those years constructing a cathedral of memory, a version of Ben that was poetic, soulful, and eternally devoted.

She wrote to Beatrice, a woman who had worked with Ben in a corporate law firm in Chicago. She wanted a witness to the sanctity of their love.

Beatrice's reply was short. It was a single page of typed text, devoid of any emotional flourish.

"Ben was a mediocre lawyer and a boring man," Beatrice wrote. "He didn't have a poetic bone in his body. He spent most of his time complaining about the coffee and talking about his fantasy football league. As for his devotion to you—he spent the last six months of his life trying to find a way to divorce you without losing the house."

Anna read the letter three times. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She simply sat in her white chair, staring at the white wall.

She thought about the "soulful" conversations they had had about Rilke. She remembered now that she had been the one doing all the talking, and Ben had just nodded, occasionally asking if she had seen the remote. She thought about the "devoted" glances he had given her. They weren't glances of love; they were glances of boredom.

The cathedral of memory collapsed in a single instant. There was no rubble, no dust, just a sudden, vast emptiness.

Anna realized that she had not been mourning a man, but a projection. She had used Ben's death as a canvas to paint her own ideal of love, and in doing so, she had erased the actual human being who had lived and breathed beside her.

She got up and walked to the kitchen. She made a cup of black coffee. It tasted bitter and burnt.

She looked at the photo of Ben on the mantel. He looked back at her with a blank, unremarkable expression. He was just a man. A boring, mediocre man who had wanted to leave her.

Anna felt a strange sense of relief. The burden of maintaining the myth was gone. She was no longer the widow of a saint; she was just a woman in a white room with a dead man she didn't actually know.

She took the photo and placed it face down on the table. Then, she opened the window and let the cold, indifferent wind of the city blow through the room, clearing out the last remnants of the perfume she had worn for him.

The room was white. The light was grey. And for the first time in years, Anna felt absolutely nothing. And that was exactly what she wanted.

*** Objective Tensor Code: [OTMES_v2] - Main Core: (M3: 8.0, N2: 0.9, K1: 0.5) - TI: 55.1 (T3 Martyrdom) - Theta: 240° - Energy: 11.2 - Code: OTMES-V2-L-551-240-C5