She remained silent for a long time.
Then she said something I still haven’t been able to forget.
“Tomorrow you’ll find out who I really have been in your life.”
The continuation of the story is in the comments 👇‼️
That night, she refused to explain anything.
She said she wanted to tell me everything in the morning.
But when I woke up the next day, Susan’s bed was empty.
Her suitcase was gone.
She wasn’t answering her phone.
And on my table was a white envelope.
There was only one sentence written on it:
“Linda, read this until the end. Then you can hate me.”
I opened the envelope.
The first thing I saw inside was Michael’s handwriting.
My husband’s handwriting.
And after reading the first sentence of that letter, everything slipped from my hands.
For several minutes, I sat on the edge of the bed, unable to pick up the letter.
Michael had been dead for eleven months.
I would have recognized his handwriting anywhere.
During our thirty-two years of marriage, he had left me hundreds of little notes on the refrigerator, birthday cards, shopping lists, and sometimes simply two words:
“I love you.”
There was no possibility that I was mistaken.
Michael had written that letter.
It began:
“Linda, if you are reading this, it means Susan finally decided to tell you what I never had the courage to confess.”
My heart began pounding.
I kept reading.
Michael wrote that during the twentieth year of our marriage, he had done something he could never forgive himself for.
That was the year I spent months caring for my sick mother. I stayed at her house most of the week.
I remembered that time perfectly.
Susan was also going through a difficult period. Her marriage had just ended. She came to our house frequently.
Sometimes I was even the one who asked her to stop by, bring Michael something for dinner, or simply keep him company.
Then I reached a sentence in the letter and stopped.
I didn’t want to keep reading.
But I already knew.
What I was most afraid of finding was written in the next few lines.
Michael and Susan had had an affair.
Not just once.
It hadn’t been an accidental mistake.s
It had lasted almost eight months.
I threw the letter onto the floor.
The first thing I felt wasn’t even anger.
