He had no personal social media that I had ever known about, or so I thought.
But when I searched more carefully, combining his name with the city, I found a photo on a local community event page. A neighborhood block party on the east side of the city.
Dated 8 months ago.
He was standing next to a woman.
She was laughing, one hand raised as if she had just said something funny.
He was smiling in a way I had not seen in photographs in years.
They were not touching, but they were close.
The kind of clothes that does not happen between strangers.
Her name was tagged in the post.
I stared at it for a long time.
Her name was Megan.
I did not sleep.
I worked a morning shift the next day on 4 hours of rest and kept my face completely neutral for 12 hours.
I have gotten good at that.
Working in a hospital, you learn to manage what you show.
That evening, I went back to the community event page and found more.
Megan had a public profile on a neighborhood app, one of those platforms where local residents post about lost pets and yard sales and street closures.
She had been posting from an address in the Harrove area, which was the exact area Diane’s brother-in-law had mentioned for over a year.
I found a photo she had posted of a meal she described as a home-cooked dinner.
In the background, slightly out of focus, was a bookshelf.
On the top shelf, I could see two framed photos.
I zoomed in as far as the resolution would allow.
One of the frames held a photo I recognized.
It was taken at my in-laws house four Christmases ago.
My husband was standing next to his father.
I had been the one who took that picture.
I remembered it because the flash on my phone had been broken that day, and I had taken six tries to get enough light.
That photograph was sitting on a shelf in a woman named Megan’s apartment.
I pressed my hands flat on the kitchen table and breathed slowly until the shaking stopped.
The next morning, I called my husband’s company directly, not his personal number, the company’s main line.
I explained that I was trying to reach the offshore team regarding my husband and his current rotation.
The receptionist placed me on hold.
A minute passed.
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