When my husband told me he was leaving, he didn’t even try to soften the blow.
“There’s someone else,” he said, staring at the wall behind me as if I were already fading from his life. “She makes me feel alive again.”
Alive again.
As if the years we spent building a home, raising two beautiful children, and sacrificing together were some kind of slow death.
He moved out the next week—to an apartment downtown with a woman ten years younger than me. I stayed behind in the house we had bought together, holding our son while he cried and answering our daughter’s impossible question: “Why doesn’t Daddy love us anymore?”
The divorce was cold and swift. He insisted on selling the house, but I fought to keep it for the kids. In the end, I couldn’t afford the mortgage alone. We moved into a small rental on the edge of town. I took extra shifts. I stopped buying new clothes. I learned how to stretch every dollar and hide my tears until after the kids fell asleep.
Five years passed.
