Chapter 2: The Envelope
For a second, I honestly thought she'd come to apologize.
I stepped aside to let her in.
"Before I show you why I came," she said, "I need you to promise me something."
"What?"
"Promise you won't tell my son I came here until you've seen everything."
I stared at her for a moment before finally nodding.
Only then did she pull a thick envelope from her purse and place it on the table.
"I need you to look at these."
Inside were several photographs.
The first showed my husband sitting across from a woman at a café.
Another showed them leaving an office building together.
In a third, they were walking through a park while she appeared to be wiping tears from her face, and my husband had a hand on her shoulder.
None of the pictures proved anything.
But together...
they made my stomach twist.
I looked up at my mother-in-law.
"Who is she?"
She slowly shook her head.
"I don't know."
I frowned.
"Then why are you showing me this?"
She looked down at her hands.
"For two years, I kept waiting for your marriage to fall apart."
A sad smile crossed her face.
"I was convinced my son had made the biggest mistake of his life."
She paused before continuing.
"But it never happened."
Another silence filled the room.
Finally, she said,
"A few weeks ago... these ended up in my hands."
She gently pushed the envelope back toward me.
May you like
"I don't know who that woman is."
"I thought you needed to know the truth."
