Loving quietly - the pain of what could have been!

Used chatgpt for framing

[29M] There’s this friend of mine I’ve known for eight years. We used to talk a lot, and it was pretty clear that we had feelings for each other. She was hung up on another guy for two or three years, though, and I never confessed because I felt it would be wrong. She was my friend, and it was obvious she wasn’t over someone else.
Three years later, life happened. I got busy and met someone I thought was my person. Eventually, my friend and I started talking less and less, until we barely knew what was happening in each other’s lives. I was happy, busy, learning, and growing with my partner. She was busy with her own life too. We barely spoke during that time, and she dated a couple of guys along the way.
Then, four years later, my partner cheated on me with multiple guys—which is a whole other fuckery of a story. I took my time, healed, and finally moved on last year.
That’s when I got back in touch with this friend. We started talking again, and, somewhere along the way, all those old feelings came rushing back.
We talked about the years we’d spent apart, and I apologised because, in hindsight, I feel like I was partly responsible for letting the friendship fade. We’re talking again now, but she has a partner.
And honestly, I want her to be happy. I really do. She’s been through her own share of struggles, and if she’s happy where she is, I don’t want to be the reason that changes.
But, man, it hurts.
Because I can’t stop thinking about what we had. There was something genuinely amazing between us once, and somewhere along the way, it got lost. Maybe things would have been different if I had just confessed back then. Maybe not. I’ll never know.
I just wish there were some way to tell her how I feel without actually telling her. To let her know that, despite all these years, a part of me still wonders what we could have been—without putting that weight on her, without disrupting the life she has now.
I guess that’s the hardest part: knowing that sometimes you can genuinely love someone, want nothing but happiness for them, and still quietly wish that, in some other version of your life, things had turned out differently.