thought I had buried my past with my husband, who I thought had died three years earlier. He was alive, smiling, and holding a woman and a girl’s hands on a distant beach. My world collapsed again. Was it him? Why was he with another family?
You picture decades ahead when you marry someone—a shared house, possibly children, and the peaceful comfort of knowing they’ll be by your side as your hair turns silver and your skin creases. You never expect that dream to end overnight. Nobody prepares you for the idea that the person you love most could go without a trace, leaving you with a heartbeat but no existence.