…the bathroom sink. He told me you were his ex-wife. That you’d moved to Spain years ago. That you were cruel to him.”
I stood on her doorstep in shock. She stood in hers, holding the doorframe.
Her name was Melissa. The little boy was Jack. He was three.
She invited me in. I don’t know why I went. Maybe because she looked as sick as I felt.
She told me she’d met my husband, Paul, four years ago, at a hardware store. He’d told her he was divorced. That his ex-wife had taken everything and moved to Europe. He came over on Tuesdays and Thursdays “after work.” He said he traveled the rest of the week. She’d believed him. Why wouldn’t she?
“The necklace,” I said. “Where did you get it?”
She put her hand on it. A small gold locket with a diamond chip. “He gave it to me on my birthday. Two years ago. He said it was his grandmother’s.”
It was mine. My mother gave it to me on my wedding day. It went “missing” two years ago, right after our anniversary. I’d torn the house apart looking for it. I’d cried for a week. Paul had helped me look.
Melissa took it off, very carefully, and handed it to me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
She showed me where he kept the photo. A shoebox under the sink, in the bathroom he used when he stayed over. Inside was a single picture of me, from our wedding. And a stack of letters I’d written him over the years, birthday cards and anniversary notes, that I’d thought were in a box in our attic.
“I found it last month,” Melissa said. “I asked him who you were. He said you were ‘the one that got away.’ He said he still had feelings for his ex-wife and it was ‘complicated.’ I thought you were someone from his past.”
I was his present. For twenty years, I was his present.
I drove home and put the locket back on. I waited at the kitchen table. When Paul walked in, he saw it around my neck and stopped in the doorway.
“I met Jack,” I said. “He’s very cute. He has your ears.”
Paul started crying before I finished the sentence.
I filed for divorce the next week. Melissa ended things with him too. My lawyer and hers coordinated, which I’m told is unusual. Paul is paying child support for Jack and alimony to me. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment. Neither of us visits.
Melissa sent me a text a few months later. A photo of Jack on his first day of preschool. “He asked about the lady with the necklace. I told him you were a friend.”
I wrote back. “Tell him I said hi.”
I wear the locket every day now. I had a small engraving added on the back. Just two words. “Mine again.”
