“I’m alive. And we’re still married,” I wrote.
Almost an hour passed.
Then my phone rang.
It was Claire.
“Are you the woman Mark told me died 12 years ago?”
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Apparently, I am.”
Claire told me she’d met Mark almost two years earlier at the lake.
He’d stopped at her gift shop while his friends were fishing.
He was charming, attentive, and unusually open about his past.
According to Claire, his wife had died 12 years earlier.
“He said he couldn’t wear his wedding ring anymore,” she explained. “He said it reminded him of losing you.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes. He said he’d hurt his finger around the same time.”
I remembered Mark coming home from work with his hand wrapped in a towel.
I’d driven him to urgent care, helped him dress while his finger healed, and eventually put his uncomfortable wedding ring in our drawer.
