And I believed him.
God help me, I believed every word.
Now I’m forty-two.
Forty-two and single for the first time in decades.
Literal decades.
The number rolls around my head like it belongs to someone else.
Because I’ve never been single.Not really.
There was always Mike.
Mike through high school.
Mike when I started working at the mill.
Mike, when we got married in a courthouse with my brother as a witness and a cheap breakfast afterward because we didn’t have money for anything fancier.
Mike when Evan was born.
Mike when life got hard.
Mike when the years blurred together in a rhythm of work and family and routine.
Mike was always there.
Until he wasn’t.
The house is too quiet now.
I stand in the bedroom we used to share, staring at the half-empty closet where his clothes used to hang.
The space looks wrong.
Like a missing tooth.
What happened to Mike?
Good question.
Because the Mike Stevens I thought I knew bears absolutely zero resemblance to the man who ran off with a younger woman.
A girl young enough that when I first heard about her, I thought someone was joking.
Young enough that the word betrayal doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The man I built my life with didn’t just leave.
He vanished.
Took money with him.
Took pieces of the life I thought we’d built together.
Took the illusion that what we had meant something real.
