After burying my wife Stacey, I focused on being both parents to our heartbroken five-year-old. Our beach vacation marked two months since the “accident” that took her from us – or so I believed until Luke’s excited scream pierced the ocean breeze: “Daddy! Mommy’s here!”
The woman had Stacey’s posture, her hair, even the way she tucked it behind her ear. When she turned, my world tilted. Those were my wife’s eyes staring back at me – alive and full of panic. She grabbed her companion’s arm and fled, leaving me clutching a confused Luke.
The truth came out in painful fragments. There was no accident. No tragic death. Just a planned disappearance orchestrated by Stacey and her parents so she could start fresh with her lover and their baby. “I thought this would be cleaner,” she told me, as if faking her death was some sort of mercy.
Clean? There was nothing clean about watching Luke beg his mother not to leave him again. Nothing clean about explaining to a kindergarten that Mommy chose to go away. The woman I married died that day on the beach – not in body, but in every way that mattered.
