For three days I moved through the house like someone recovering from an accident. Our children called. I let it go to voicemail. I made coffee and forgot to drink it. I picked up Thomas’s photograph from the mantel twice, intending to put it face down, and both times I set it back.
On the fourth day, I drove to Anna’s house.
It was a modest white bungalow forty minutes away. Wind chimes on the porch. A bicycle lying on its side in the yard. I almost turned around.
But the front door opened before I reached it.
She knew me immediately.
Of course she did.
She had my eyes.
For one impossible second, I saw Thomas in both directions at once: the man I had married, and the man standing hidden inside his own choices.
Anna looked as frightened as I felt. “Mrs. Mercer,” she said softly.
I should tell you that I screamed, or slapped her, or demanded answers.
I did none of those things.
I simply stood there, a widow in sensible shoes, looking at the proof that my husband had lived another life just beyond the edge of mine.
And the only thing I could think was this:
I should never have opened that closet.
Because some doors do not reveal monsters.
They reveal human beings.
Flawed, loving, cowardly human beings.
And once you see them clearly, you cannot go back to grieving the simpler version of them you lost.
