My Wife Vanished With Our Son While I Was With My Mistress — What She Left Behind Broke Me

Part 2

The letter was incredibly short.

It was not unkind, and it did not accuse me of a single specific thing.

That omission was, I understood immediately, the cruelest precision of all.

To accuse me would have required her to believe that an accusation might still alter the case.

The letter simply stated that she had been thinking for some time and had finally decided.

She wrote that she would not be returning.

She had taken Tommy because a child desperately needs his mother and can easily spare his father.

She promised she would write again in time, whenever there was something actually worth writing about.

She wished me well.

She signed it with her given name only, deliberately stripping away the married surname I had given her.

I read the short page twice, my breathing shallow in the silent room.

Then I folded it carefully along the exact creases she had made.

I set it back against the silver inkstand and sat looking at it for a long time without moving.

When I finally stood up, my legs were stiff, as if I had been kneeling on stone.

Megan was standing quietly in the doorway of the library.

I had not even heard her walk in.

“David,” she said again, her voice wavering slightly.

I looked at her properly for the first time since the carriage had disappeared down the drive.

I saw that she was much younger than I remembered, and frightened, and trying very hard not to show it.

She had insisted on coming north with me on the last leg of the road, against my better judgment.

She had believed, with the bright, unkillable belief of a nineteen-year-old, that once she was inside my house, she would somehow already belong to it.

I felt a brief surge of pity for her.

I felt infinitely sorrier for myself.

But I felt the most sorrow for the woman in the carriage who had never asked for any of this.

Sarah had borne my absence in total silence.

She had at last simply walked out the door with her child in her arms and her dignity entirely intact.

“Megan,” I said, my voice sounding hollow in the vast room, “you never should have come.”

She nodded slowly, her eyes dropping to the floor.

“I know,” she whispered.

“I am sorry.”

I did not know what else to do with my hands, so I picked up my wife’s letter again.

I arranged a car and a driver for Megan the very next morning.

I did not send her away unkindly, providing a sum of money sufficient to keep her in modest comfort for two years.

I stood at the heavy oak doors as she climbed into the back seat.

She asked if I would ever write to her.

I told her I would not, and she nodded, accepting the finality of it.

The car took her away down the exact same driveway my wife had used the day before.

The muddy rag bear was still lying there at the foot of the stone steps.

No one in the household had even thought to pick it up.

I walked down into the rain and picked it up myself.

The fur was sodden, and the stuffing inside the head had gone hard and lumpish.

There was a small embroidered initial on the sole of one foot, a letter T for Tommy.

I carried the ruined toy inside and set it on the writing desk right beside Sarah’s letter.

I had cleared my house of the affair, but the silence left behind was suffocating.

But how could I possibly prove I had changed to a woman who had left no forwarding address?