I stared at it for nearly ten minutes, sitting in his leather chair, the one he’d claimed as his kingdom for twenty-five years. It still held the faint scent of his coffee, his aftershave, the dusty sweetness of old paper. The house around me was quiet in that particular way grief makes it—no music, no phone calls, no footsteps except your own.
Three months had passed since the storm in March, the one that tore down branches and knocked out power all over our corner of Connecticut. Three months since Robert’s car collided with an oak tree on a slick road and left me trying to learn how to exist as a “widow” before the word even fit my mouth.
I held the drive in my palm, smaller than a pack of gum, and felt something in my gut tighten—an instinct, maybe, or a warning.
Then I did what I always do when I’m afraid of what I might find.
I chose to know.
I inserted the USB into his laptop.
The screen flickered and offered a single video file, dated two weeks before the accident.
My mouse hovered over it, my finger stiff with indecision.
Then I clicked.
The video opened, and my husband’s face filled the screen.
But it wasn’t the confident, gentle man I’d shared breakfast with every morning for a quarter century. It wasn’t the husband who helped Alex with homework every night, the father who brought me coffee in bed every Sunday morning, the man who held me during thunderstorms because he knew they made me anxious.
The man on my screen looked like someone who hadn’t slept in days.
His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. His face was pale and drawn. His hands shook as he positioned himself in front of the camera, like the camera itself could judge him.
“Sarah,” he began, and my name cracked something in his voice.
“If you’re watching this,” he said, “then I’m gone, and it’s time you learned the truth about who you’ve been married to all these years.”
My chest tightened.
I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
Then, as if he had practiced and still couldn’t get it right, he glanced down and forced out a sentence that didn’t belong to the man I knew.
The words were so jarring I almost laughed—except nothing about my body remembered how.
He blinked hard, wiped at his face, and leaned closer, as if proximity could make confession easier.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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