I never meant to eavesdrop. But one whispered sentence froze me: my 16-year-old daughter telling her stepdad, “Mom doesn’t know the truth… and she can’t find out.”
The next afternoon, they said they were running a school errand. My heart raced as I followed them, convincing myself I was overreacting. But when their car veered away from the store and into a hospital parking lot, I knew this was bigger than I imagined.
In the days before, she had grown quieter—careful, deliberate, not just teenage distant. Calls from her school about unexplained absences confirmed my unease. At the hospital, I watched them buy flowers and disappear into an upper floor. When they returned, her eyes were red, his arm around her shoulders. I tried to ask, but hit a wall of silence. I left with more questions and a knot in my chest that refused to loosen.
The next day, I followed again, determined to know the truth. I opened a hospital room door—and it was waiting for me: my ex-husband, thin, frail, lying in a bed. The man who had walked out of our lives years ago was dying.
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