That single moment stretched into an eternity, a suspension of time where the world tilted on its axis and refused to right itself. The physical sensation was not pain, but a sudden, violent evacuation of warmth from my body, as if the blood in my veins had been instantly replaced with ice water.
With trembling fingers that felt alien and clumsy, I unlocked the device—we had never had passwords, or so I believed, because secrets were for people who didn’t love each other—and opened the message. What I found was not just a receipt for a weekend away, but a portal into a parallel universe. It was a thread of correspondence that stretched back not weeks or months, but years. There were photos of a woman I had never seen, standing in places I thought Robert had visited on “business trips”; there were messages filled with a tenderness and intimacy that I thought belonged exclusively to us; there were inside jokes, plans for a future that didn’t include me, and a casual familiarity that suggested a fully formed, secondary life.
I stood there in the kitchen, surrounded by the artifacts of our forty years together—the magnets on the fridge, the ceramic bowl we bought in Italy, the photos of our grandchildren—and realized that they were all props in a stage play where I was the only one who didn’t know the script.
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