The Rose He Lost

“Your mother was a mistress — so what does that make you?” Nathan slipped a wedding ring on Rose’s finger and demanded she become his secret lover instead — because a prettier woman had caught his eye. Rose walked out into the pouring rain, boarded a helicopter, and never looked back. Eighteen years later, she has a loving husband and two children. He has nothing — no company, no lover, no health. “”You’ll always be my rose,”” he wept on a London street. She smiled and kept walking. He died alone in a café on Carnaby Street, waiting for a woman who had already bloomed in someone else’s garden.