If someone had told me that the man I would love more than my own life would turn out to be my cousin, I would have laughed in their face. But life has a cruel way of turning your greatest happiness into your deepest wound. My name is Esther, and this is the story of how I found the love of my life, lost him on the day we were supposed to become husband and wife, and spent the rest of my life wondering why fate allowed us to meet in the first place. I met Alexander at a friend's birthday party. He wasn't the loudest man in the room, but there was something about him that drew me toward him. He had a beautiful smile, a calm voice, and a way of listening that made me feel as though I was the only person in the world. We talked for hours that evening. We discussed our childhoods, our dreams, our fears, and the kind of families we hoped to build someday. When he asked for my number, I gave it to him without hesitation. Neither of us knew that we had just taken the first step toward a heartbreak that would haunt us for the rest of our lives. Alexander became my best friend before he became my lover. He was the first person I called when something good happened. He was the person I ran to when life became unbearable. When I lost my job, he stayed awake with me all night, reassuring me that my circumstances did not define my worth. When his father was hospitalized, I spent days beside him at the hospital, holding his hand whenever the fear became too much. We didn't just fall in love. We became part of each other's lives in ways that neither of us could imagine undoing. Six months into our relationship, Alexander told me something that made me cry. We were sitting in his car when he turned toward me and said, "Esther, I've never been this certain about anything in my life. I want to marry you." I laughed because I thought he was joking. He opened the glove compartment, brought out a small box, and showed me a ring he had bought weeks earlier. "Will you marry me?" I cried before I could answer. "Yes, Alexander. A thousand times, yes." He slipped the ring onto my finger and kissed me. That night, I called my mother and told her I had found the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. She was happy for me, although she asked me several questions about his family. I answered what I knew. Alexander's father had died when he was young, and his mother lived abroad. He had grown up moving between different cities, and he knew very little about his extended family. As for me, my father had died when I was a child, and my mother rarely spoke about her father's relatives. I knew some of their names, but I had never met most of them. Our families lived separate lives, and neither Alexander nor I had any reason to suspect that our histories were connected. We began planning our wedding. I chose my dress. He chose his suit. We argued playfully about our honeymoon destination and spent evenings imagining the house we would build together. Sometimes, he would hold me and whisper, "I wish I had met you earlier." I would smile and reply, "Earlier? You would have married me before I even finished growing up." We would laugh. Neither of us knew how cruel those words would sound when we remembered them later.