I Had An Ominous Fear About My Husband That I Kept Secret For Years. Then It Came True.

Simon and I couldn’t be more different. When we met, I was 38, he was 54, and his unabashed zest for life broke through my complicated caution. I knew I was in love when, after a lazy summer evening together, I lay on the stone beside a Trafalgar Square fountain and felt joy seep through my skin.

I moved in with him, his rural 15th-century cottage becoming our home, workplace (me in medicine, he in shipping), and where I discovered previously unknown contentment.

After a decade, as others might contemplate retirement, Simon decided to retrain as a boatbuilder. We relocated to a stunning coastal town. He studied and then created a business with fellow graduates.

Fitter, stronger, tanned, with resin in his hair and a pencil behind his ear — and already so good at being happy — Simon said he’d never known anything like this new life of ours.

Me too, except for the shadow: While loving him, I lived with the constant dread of losing him.

This wasn’t entirely new.

A parental war-zone childhood made me fear for my wonderful, careworn mother. I learned that good goes bad. Night always follows day.

When I was 7, I figured the best way to protect against 24-hour cycles of pain was not to trust — if I let my guard down, hell broke loose.

Sometimes, I forced myself to imagine my mother dying: Things were manageable if they weren’t terminal.

I lived with this exhausting logic until I was 30, when good changes in my life shifted my focus, and I worried less about mum. But cancer soon shattered this truce and she died at 62.

Worrying about her hadn’t kept her safe, so it was pointless. Or… had worrying less allowed her to die?

Having found Simon’s all-embracing love, I was taking no chances with losing him too. Ashamed of my