I begged the nurse to help me understand who the woman was.
I must have looked wild, because after a moment she went and found a kind administrator, who let me see a few seconds of footage from a hallway camera.
And there she was.
A thin woman, maybe fifty, in that same gray sweater, carrying a paper cup of coffee toward Jack’s room like she had done it a hundred times before.
A woman I had never seen in my life.
I drove home with the bag on the passenger seat like a second person.
For several days I could not sleep.
Who was she.
Why had Jack never said her name.
What had my husband been keeping from me in the last weeks I thought we were sharing completely, down to the last breath.
I started imagining things.
A first love. A second family. A whole secret life running alongside the broke, exhausted, honest one I thought we’d shared for seventeen years.
