The last time I saw my wife Stacey alive, she kissed me goodbye with her signature lavender-scented hair. Two months later, I stood at her grave holding our five-year-old son Luke’s hand, trying to explain why Mommy wasn’t coming home. Or so I thought.
Our beach vacation was supposed to help us heal. The salt air and crashing waves did seem to lift Luke’s spirits – until the moment that shattered everything. “Daddy! Look! It’s Mommy!” he shouted, pointing at a woman down the shore. My blood turned to ice when she turned around.
There stood Stacey – alive, healthy, and holding hands with a stranger. The woman I’d mourned, whose funeral I’d missed because her parents insisted on a rushed burial, was casually strolling along the beach as if she hadn’t ripped our family apart.
The confrontation that followed revealed a truth more painful than her death. An affair. A pregnancy. A calculated disappearance staged with her parents’ help. “We thought it would be easier this way,” she whispered, as if faking her death was some sort of kindness.
Watching Luke’s little face crumple when he realized his mother had chosen to abandon him was the hardest moment of my life. How do you explain to a child that the person they love most would rather be dead to them than stay?
