Chapter 5
I climbed the carpeted stairs. Each step felt like walking through waist-deep water. The blood was roaring in my ears so loudly I thought it might drown out the sounds coming from the room at the end of the hall, but it didn’t. The sounds only grew sharper, wetter, more devastatingly real.The bedroom door was slightly ajar, a gap of perhaps three inches.
I stopped. I didn’t breathe. I looked through the crack.
I saw them.
I saw my husband, the man who had held my hand during my father’s funeral, the man who had cried when our daughter was born. His back was to the door. And beneath him, her hands tangled in his graying hair, was a woman I had never seen before in my life. She was young—painfully young, perhaps early thirties—with long, glossy dark hair spread across my pillows. She was petite, her skin flawless. A royal blue wrap dress lay discarded on the floor, pooled right next to Michael’s familiar blue button-down shirt.
May you like
They were on our bed. The expensive, orthopedic mattress we had painstakingly selected together fifteen years ago because my lower back had started giving out from sitting at a desk too long.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t drop the folder. I didn’t make a single sound. The shock was so absolute, so physically overwhelming, that it completely severed the connection between my brain and my vocal cords. I felt entirely hollowed out, as if my internal organs had been instantly vaporized.
