She wasn't reading.
She wasn't looking at her phone.
She wasn't even watching the people passing her.
She was simply staring at the floor.
Then she lifted her face.
And my stomach dropped.
“Sophie?”
Her eyes widened.
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Then she whispered my name.
“Ethan?”
I had imagined seeing my ex-wife again a hundred different ways.
At a grocery store.
At some restaurant with another man.
Maybe across the street someday, both of us pretending not to notice each other.
I had never imagined finding her alone in a hospital gown two months after our divorce.
And I definitely hadn't imagined being terrified that she might die.
My name is Ethan Walker.
I'm thirty-four years old, and until that afternoon I believed the worst mistake of my life had already happened.
I thought it was my divorce.
I was wrong.
The real mistake had happened long before either of us signed the papers.
It was believing I understood my wife simply because I lived beside her.
Sophie and I met when we were twenty-six.
She worked at a small publishing company outside Chicago, and I was building a career in corporate logistics.
She wasn't loud or dramatic.
She was the kind of person who remembered how everyone took their coffee.
The kind who bought extra groceries because she knew the elderly woman upstairs struggled to carry bags.
The kind who could make a rented one-bedroom apartment feel like a home simply by lighting a candle and putting music on while she cooked.
When I proposed, she cried before I even finished asking.
For the first few years, our marriage was easy.
Not perfect.
Easy.
