I was at the fragrance counter in Denver’s Cherry Creek Shopping Center, testing hand cream samples with the careful deliberation of someone who has nowhere else to be. The sales associate had lined up four small glass vials in front of me—bergamot and sage, vanilla orchid, something called “midnight bloom”—and I was pretending each one required serious consideration. It was one of those small, meaningless rituals you cling to when your life feels like it’s been wound too tight for too long, and you desperately need something gentle and ordinary to anchor you.
The mall hummed with the particular energy of a Saturday afternoon—couples wandering hand-in-hand, teenagers clustered near the food court, the soft jazz piping through hidden speakers mixing with the click of heels on marble floors. I had flown in that morning from Chicago on a last-minute ticket I’d booked the night before, though I couldn’t have explained to anyone exactly why. Just a feeling. The kind of instinct that lives somewhere below conscious thought, in the part of you that knows things before your rational mind catches up.
That’s when I saw him.
Not across the street or in some blurry reflection that I could have dismissed as paranoia or coincidence. Right there, perhaps thirty feet away in the high-end corridor that connected Nordstrom to the luxury boutiques, under lighting designed to make everything look polished and intentional, like a scene from a lifestyle magazine.
Ethan. My husband of three years, my partner of nine.
His hand rested at the small of a woman’s back with the kind of easy intimacy that doesn’t belong to strangers or colleagues. His other hand carried a crisp shopping bag with an elegant gold-leaf logo, the kind of bag that signals money spent without hesitation. He leaned down to speak to her, and even from this distance, I could see the softness in his posture, the attentiveness I hadn’t experienced from him in months, maybe longer.
The woman looked up at him with an expression I recognized immediately—the kind of unguarded adoration that comes with new love, when everything the other person says feels profound and revelatory, when you’re still discovering each other and haven’t yet learned the disappointing shortcuts of familiarity.
She was beautiful in a way that made my stomach clench. Older than me by perhaps ten years, elegant in the effortless manner that comes from money and careful maintenance and a lifetime of knowing how to carry yourself. She wore clothes that whispered expensive rather than shouted it—a cream cashmere sweater, tailored wool trousers, shoes that probably cost more than my monthly car payment. Her hair fell in perfect waves that suggested a standing appointment at a salon where they didn’t post prices.
I watched Ethan say something that made her laugh, her hand reaching up to touch his arm in that unconscious way people do when they’re comfortable with someone, when touching them feels as natural as breathing.
Then Ethan glanced up, perhaps feeling the weight of being watched, and his eyes met mine.
His entire face froze. It was like watching someone press pause on a performance mid-scene—everything locked in place, his smile stiffening into something grotesque, color draining from his cheeks.
The woman noticed his expression change. Her smile faltered, confusion flickering across her features. Her eyes followed his gaze to me, then flicked back to him, then to me again, the way people do when they realize they’ve walked into the middle of a story they weren’t told about, when the context they thought they understood suddenly shifts beneath them.
I set down the hand cream I’d been testing. My hands were steady, though my pulse hammered loud in my ears, a rushing sound like standing too close to the ocean. I walked straight toward them, my heels clicking against the marble with a rhythm that sounded too loud, too deliberate. The fragrance counter fell away behind me. The soft jazz faded. Everything narrowed to this moment, this confrontation I hadn’t planned but somehow knew was inevitable.
I stopped directly in front of them. Up close, I could see the fine lines around the woman’s eyes that good skincare had softened but couldn’t erase. I could smell Ethan’s cologne—the new one he’d started wearing two months ago, the one he’d said made him feel more professional.
I gave them the sweetest smile I could manufacture, the kind of smile that requires every ounce of self-control you possess, the kind you wear when you’re choosing not to explode in a public place.
“Well, hello,” I said, my voice coming out softer than I’d intended. I looked at the woman, then at Ethan, then back to the woman. “Your friend is lovely, Ethan. She seems a bit older than you, doesn’t she?”
The shopping bag slipped from Ethan’s fingers and hit the polished floor with a quiet thud that sounded impossibly loud in the suddenly dense silence between us. The bag tipped over, and I caught a glimpse of tissue paper, the corner of a box.
The woman’s face went pale. She looked at Ethan, then at me, her mouth opening slightly as if to speak, though no sound came out immediately. When she finally found her voice, it shook. “I’m sorry, do you two know each other?”
“Oh, we’re married,” I said pleasantly, as if I were commenting on the weather or recommending a restaurant. I extended my hand to her in a gesture of surreal politeness. “I’m Clara. Ethan’s wife.”
She took a step backward like I’d physically struck her. Her hand didn’t rise to meet mine. “You’re… what?”
Ethan found his voice, though it came out strangled, desperate. “Clara, this isn’t—”
“It’s exactly what it looks like,” I interrupted, my smile never wavering. “But please, don’t let me interrupt your shopping. That’s a beautiful bag, by the way. Is that from the boutique on the third floor? I saw they had a lovely window display earlier.”
The woman looked at Ethan with dawning horror spreading across her features like ink in water. “You said you were divorced.”
“Separated,” Ethan corrected quickly, grasping at the distinction like a drowning man reaching for driftwood. “I said we were separated.”
“We’re not separated,” I said, my voice still eerily calm, still pleasant, as if I were correcting a minor factual error in a casual conversation. “We live together. We share a bed. Well, we did until about three months ago, when you started having so many ‘business trips’ to Denver.”
I turned my attention fully to the woman, studying her face, the genuine distress there, the shock. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t complicit. She hadn’t known. That much was clear. “What’s your name?”
She looked like she might cry or flee or both. “Victoria.”
“Victoria,” I repeated, testing the name, imagining Ethan saying it in the intimate darkness of a hotel room. “That’s a beautiful name. How long have you two been seeing each other?”
“I… I don’t…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She looked at Ethan, pleading with him to make this make sense, to explain how I could be standing here claiming to be his wife when he’d promised her something entirely different.
“Three months,” Ethan said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. His face had gone gray, ashen.
“Three months,” I echoed, and something sharp and cold settled in my chest. “The same three months you’ve been flying here every other weekend for ‘client meetings.’ The same three months you changed your phone passcode. The same three months you started taking your phone into the bathroom with you, because apparently it needed privacy from your own wife.”
Victoria turned to Ethan, and I could see her world restructuring itself in real-time, all the things he’d told her recontextualizing into lies. “You said you were getting divorced. You said you were just waiting for the paperwork to finalize. You said it was almost over.”
“He lied,” I said simply, stating the obvious because sometimes the obvious needs to be said out loud to become real. “But I think you’ve figured that out just now.”
I bent down and picked up the shopping bag from where it had fallen. The bag was heavier than I expected, substantial. I handed it to Victoria, who took it automatically, her hands trembling. “Whatever’s in here, I hope you enjoy it. I have a feeling it cost more than Ethan’s told me he’s been spending on ‘business expenses.’ Though I do know it’s at least seven thousand dollars, because I found a receipt in his jacket pocket three weeks ago.”
Victoria’s eyes widened. She looked inside the bag as if seeing it for the first time, then at Ethan, then at me. “I didn’t… he said it was a gift. I didn’t ask him to buy anything.”
“I believe you,” I said, and I meant it. She was a victim here too, just a different kind than me. “He’s very good at grand gestures. Makes you feel special, doesn’t it? Makes you feel like you’re worth the extravagance.”
I looked at Ethan one more time, this man I’d loved since I was twenty years old, who I’d built a life with, who I’d trusted so completely that I’d ignored my own instincts for months. He looked destroyed, and I felt nothing. No satisfaction, no anger, just a vast, hollow exhaustion.
“I’ll see you at home,” I said. Then I paused, reconsidered. “Or maybe I won’t. We’ll see how I feel about that.”
I turned and walked away, my heels clicking against the marble with that same too-loud rhythm. My palms were slick with sweat, my skin cold from the aggressive air conditioning, but my heart felt suddenly, strangely clear. Clear in a way it hadn’t been in months, maybe years.
Behind me, I heard Victoria say something to Ethan in a voice choked with tears, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need to know.
Outside the mall, the Denver afternoon was bright and sharp, the October air crisp with the promise of winter. Strangers moved past me carrying shopping bags and coffee cups, living their ordinary lives, unaware that mine had just fractured and reformed into something entirely different.
My phone started buzzing in my purse before I’d even made it to the parking garage. I didn’t need to look to know it was Ethan. I could picture him standing there with Victoria, fumbling for his phone, desperate to explain or apologize or beg or whatever he thought would fix this.
I didn’t answer.
I got in my rental car, drove to the airport, and changed my flight to the earliest one home. I sat in the terminal restaurant drinking terrible coffee and watching planes take off, feeling oddly calm, like I’d been holding my breath for three months and finally, finally, could exhale.
—
My name is Clara Morrison. I’m thirty-one years old, and until three months ago, I thought I had my life figured out.
Ethan and I met at Northwestern University during our sophomore year, in a required economics class that neither of us wanted to take. He sat behind me and spent the first three weeks making whispered commentary about the professor’s toupee and his tendency to use “paradigm shift” in every single lecture. I’d shushed him at first, tried to focus on taking notes, but his running commentary was genuinely funny, and eventually I found myself looking forward to that class just to hear what he’d say next.
He asked me out after our midterm. We went to a terrible Italian restaurant near campus where the pasta was overcooked and the breadsticks were stale, and we talked for four hours straight, the kind of effortless conversation that feels like discovering someone speaks your private language.
We were mismatched in obvious ways—he was outgoing and charming, the kind of person who could walk into a room full of strangers and leave with five new friends. I was quieter, more careful, the type who needed to observe before engaging. But somehow we balanced each other. He made me laugh. I made him think. We fit in a way that felt rare and real and worth protecting.
We dated through the rest of college, moved in together after graduation when we were both broke and optimistic and convinced we could make it work with nothing but love and student loan debt. He got a job in sales at a tech company. I started as a junior project manager at a consulting firm. We lived in a shoebox apartment in Wicker Park, ate ramen and celebrated small victories, built a life together piece by careful piece.
He proposed when we were twenty-six, at the park where we’d had our first date, with a ring he’d saved for months to buy. We got married two years later in a small ceremony at a botanical garden, surrounded by friends and family, convinced we were one of the couples who would make it, who would beat the odds.
For three years, we were good. Not perfect—no one is perfect—but solid. We had our routines, our inside jokes, our shared history. We talked about buying a house eventually, about having kids when we were more financially stable, about growing old together.
From the outside, we looked like we had everything figured out. Young professionals in Chicago, good jobs, nice apartment in Lincoln Park, the kind of Instagram-worthy life that suggested success and happiness in equal measure.
But inside, something had started shifting months ago, so gradually I didn’t notice until the foundation had already cracked.
—
It started three months ago, though I can see now the seeds were planted long before that.
Ethan came home from work on a Tuesday evening in July, loosened his tie, and announced casually over leftover Thai food that his company was expanding their Denver office and he’d be traveling there more frequently to help with client onboarding.
“How often?” I asked, not looking up from my laptop where I was reviewing a project timeline.
“Maybe twice a month. Three times if things get busy.”
“That’s a lot of travel.”
He shrugged, spearing a piece of chicken with his fork. “It’s good for my career. They’re talking about promotions, Clara. This could really set us up. Maybe we could finally start looking at houses seriously.”
I didn’t argue. Ethan’s career had always been important to him, and I understood ambition. I had plenty of my own. I was gunning for a senior project manager position and regularly worked sixty-hour weeks. I couldn’t fault him for wanting to advance.
But something felt off from the beginning. Not dramatically wrong, not in a way I could articulate or point to, just… off. Like a picture frame hanging slightly crooked on a wall, bothering you in a way you can’t quite explain.
His first trip was a Thursday-to-Sunday stretch. He texted a few times—landed safely, meetings going well, dinner with clients running late. Normal work trip communications. When he came back, he seemed lighter somehow. Happier. More energetic than he’d been in weeks.
I told myself it was the excitement of new opportunities, the adrenaline of impressing the Denver team.
The second trip came two weeks later. Then one week after that. Then they started stacking up with increasing frequency—every other weekend, sometimes more. Thursday through Sunday became his standard Denver schedule.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, Ethan changed.
His phone habits shifted first. He’d always been casual about it, leaving it on the counter face-up, never bothering to set a passcode. If it buzzed while he was in the shower, he’d call out, “Can you check that for me?” without hesitation.
Now it lived in his pocket, face-down when he did set it down. He changed his passcode to something I didn’t know.
“Why’d you change your passcode?” I asked one night, keeping my tone light, curious rather than accusatory.
“Security,” he said, not looking up from the screen. “We got a memo at work about protecting company data on personal devices.”
It was plausible. Completely plausible. But it felt like a lie in a way I couldn’t explain, like tasting something off in food that looks perfectly fine.
I started paying attention in the way you do when something’s wrong but you can’t name it yet, when your instincts are screaming but your rational mind keeps offering reasonable explanations.
The bathroom trips with his phone that lasted fifteen, twenty minutes. The late-night texts that made him smile in ways I hadn’t seen in months. The new cologne he started wearing—woodsy, expensive, nothing like his usual. The nicer shirts appearing in his closet, designer labels we’d never spent money on before.
“You’re dressing better,” I commented one morning, watching him button a crisp shirt I’d never seen.
“Gotta look professional,” he replied, checking his reflection. “Denver’s a younger office. I don’t want to look like the old guy showing up in last decade’s style.”
He was thirty-three.
Our sex life dwindled. He was always too tired from travel, too stressed from work. We went from once or twice a week to once every two weeks to barely at all. When I initiated, he’d give me excuses—early morning tomorrow, not feeling great, let’s wait until the weekend.
But he didn’t seem stressed. He seemed distracted. Present physically but absent in every other way that mattered.
I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself I was projecting my own stress from work onto our relationship. I told myself marriages go through phases, that this was normal, that we’d find our rhythm again.
I told myself everything except the truth.
—
The receipt changed everything.
It was three weeks before my Denver trip, on a Wednesday morning. I was taking Ethan’s gray jacket—the one he wore on business trips—to the dry cleaner when I felt the crinkle of paper in the inner pocket.
I almost didn’t check. Almost just handed it over to be cleaned. But something made me pause, made me reach in and pull out the folded paper.
A boutique receipt. Not a department store or a chain. A high-end women’s boutique in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood, the kind of place where they offer you champagne while you shop.
I unfolded it with hands that had started to shake.
One dress: $4,200
One handbag: $2,800
One pair of shoes: $595
Sales tax: $408
Total: $8,003
I stared at the numbers until they blurred. Eight thousand dollars. On women’s clothing. From Denver.
Ethan had never bought me anything that expensive. Not even close. My engagement ring had cost $3,000, and he’d apologized for it at the time, saying he’d upgrade it “when we were more financially stable,” a promise that had never materialized.
For our last anniversary, he’d given me a nice dinner and a $200 necklace from Macy’s. For my birthday, a weekend trip to a bed and breakfast two hours away.
But here was proof of $8,000 spent on someone. Someone in Denver. Someone who wore size 6 shoes and carried designer handbags.
I took a photo of the receipt with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling, then carefully folded it and placed it back in the jacket pocket exactly where I’d found it. I took the jacket to the dry cleaners as planned, moving through the motions like a robot, my mind elsewhere.
That night, Ethan came home late—a “drinks with the team” night, he said. He kissed my forehead in greeting, said he was exhausted, and went to bed early.
I stayed up sitting in the dark living room, looking at the photo of the receipt on my phone, the numbers glowing in the darkness.
$8,003.
For a woman who wasn’t me.
—
I could have confronted him then. Thrown the receipt in his face, demanded explanations, started the fight that had been building for months. Part of me wanted to—wanted the explosive release of finally saying what I’d been thinking, feeling, suspecting.
But I didn’t.
Because sitting there in the dark, I realized something: I didn’t just want to know if Ethan was cheating. I wanted to know who he was when he thought I wasn’t watching. I wanted to see the full picture of what my life had become.
So I waited. I watched. I kept track.
Every Denver trip, carefully noted. Every late-night text session where he’d smile at his phone while I pretended to sleep beside him. Every new shirt, every excuse for why he was too tired for sex but somehow energetic enough to stay up texting until midnight.
People think catching a cheater is about finding smoking-gun evidence—compromising photos, explicit texts, lipstick on a collar. But it’s not. It’s about patterns. Habits. The hundred small lies that add up to one undeniable truth.
Ethan was living a double life, and he thought I was too trusting—or too stupid—to notice.
Three weeks after finding the receipt, my carefully constructed surveillance plan fell apart in the most mundane way possible: a client canceled a Friday meeting I’d been preparing for all week.
I hung up the phone and stared at my suddenly empty calendar, and felt something shift inside me—not a thought, not a plan, but a certainty.
Ethan was in Denver that weekend. Thursday through Sunday, like usual.
I looked at the photo of the receipt I’d saved on my phone. Cherry Creek Shopping Center.
I opened my laptop and booked a flight before I could talk myself out of it.
—
The Friday morning flight from O’Hare to Denver International took two hours and felt like both an eternity and an instant. I told no one where I was going—not my sister, not my best friend, not even my assistant. I just went, operating on instinct and fury and a bone-deep need to know.
I landed at 11 AM mountain time. The Denver sky was impossibly blue, the kind of bright, sharp autumn day that feels like a mockery when your life is falling apart. I took an Uber straight to Cherry Creek, gave the driver a generous tip, and walked into the mall with no plan beyond showing up.
I wandered through the shops, pretending to browse, my heart hammering every time I saw someone who looked like Ethan from behind. The mall was busy with weekend shoppers, the air filled with perfume samples and soft music and the low murmur of consumer satisfaction.
I was testing hand cream at a fragrance counter, killing time, when I saw him.
—
The flight back to Chicago felt different from the flight there. Going to Denver, I’d been propelled by adrenaline and anger and the terrible need to confirm what I already knew. Coming home, I felt hollowed out, emptied of everything except a strange, cold clarity.
Ethan called seventeen times during my flight. Sent twenty-three texts. I didn’t read them, didn’t listen to the voicemails. I just watched the notifications pile up with a kind of detached curiosity, like observing a scientific experiment.
I took an Uber from O’Hare to our apartment in Lincoln Park. It was 11 PM when I walked through the door. Ethan was sitting on the couch, still in his travel clothes, his face pale and drawn like he’d aged five years in eight hours.
“You went to Denver,” he said. Not a question. A confirmation. An acknowledgment of how thoroughly everything had shattered.
“I did,” I replied calmly, setting my bag down by the door.
“Clara—” His voice cracked.
“I saw you,” I said. “With her. Victoria.”
He closed his eyes like he could make this disappear by not looking at it. “I can explain.”
“Then explain.”
He stood up, ran his hands through his hair—the gesture he always made when he was stressed, when he was searching for the right words. “It’s not what you think.”
I almost laughed. The cliché of it. The absolute predictability. “It’s exactly what I think, Ethan. You’re having an affair.”
“It’s not an affair,” he said desperately, and I could hear him trying to convince himself as much as me. “It’s… it’s complicated.”
“Uncomplicate it for me.”
He took a breath, and for a moment I thought he might actually tell me the truth. “Victoria is someone I met on one of my trips. We started talking. She’s going through a divorce. She was lonely. I was lonely. It just… happened.”
“You’re lonely?” I repeated, and I could hear my voice rising despite my attempts to stay calm. “You live with your wife, Ethan. How are you lonely?”
“You’re always working,” he said, his voice rising to match mine. “You’re always busy, always stressed, always focused on the next project. When was the last time we had a real conversation? When was the last time we actually connected about something that mattered?”
“When was the last time you tried?” I shot back. “When was the last time you asked me about my day, my work, anything that was going on in my life? When was the last time you initiated a conversation that wasn’t about logistics—what’s for dinner, did you pay the electric bill, what time are we leaving?”
“That’s not fair—”
“What’s not fair is you spending eight thousand dollars on another woman while telling me we can’t afford to upgrade my engagement ring. What’s not fair is you booking romantic weekends in Denver while telling me we need to budget for a house. What’s not fair is you lying to me for three months while sleeping in my bed and kissing me goodbye every morning like everything was fine.”
His face went white. “How did you know about the money?”
“I found the receipt. Three weeks ago. I’ve known for three weeks, Ethan. I just wanted to see how far you’d go. How long you’d lie to my face.”
He sank back onto the couch like his strings had been cut, his head in his hands. “Clara, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“But it did happen. And you chose it. Every single time. Every flight you booked, every lie you told, every text message you sent her while I was sleeping next to you—those were choices. Your choices.”
“I’ll end it,” he said desperately, looking up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “I’ll stop going to Denver. I’ll delete her number, block her on everything. We can go to counseling. We can fix this, Clara. Please. We can fix this.”
I looked at him—this man I’d loved since I was twenty years old, who I’d built a life with, who I’d trusted so completely that I’d ignored my own instincts for months—and I felt nothing but exhaustion.
“No,” I said quietly. “We can’t.”
“Clara, please. I made a mistake. I’ll do anything—”
“I don’t want to fix this, Ethan. I want a divorce.”
—
The divorce took eight months of lawyers and paperwork and the slow, painful dismantling of a shared life. Ethan fought it at first, begged for couples counseling, sent flowers to my office, wrote long emails about how he’d changed, how he understood now what he’d lost.
But I was done. Done in a way that felt final and immovable, like a door closing and locking behind me.
We divided our assets. I kept the apartment—my name had been on the lease first, and he didn’t fight me on it. He moved into a temporary rental in West Loop, took half the furniture, half the kitchen supplies, half the books we’d collected together.
I found out later through a mutual friend that Victoria broke up with him two weeks after the mall encounter. She’d told him she couldn’t trust someone who’d lied so thoroughly to both of them, that she couldn’t build something real on such a rotten foundation.
Ethan tried to reconcile with me one more time after that, showing up at my office with expensive coffee and red eyes and what looked like genuine remorse.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “The biggest mistake of my life.”
“You made a choice,” I corrected him. “Multiple choices. Over and over again, for three months. And those choices destroyed everything we built together.”
“Do you ever think about what we had?” he asked, his voice breaking. “All those years? Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“I think about who I thought you were,” I said honestly. “And I mourn that person. I mourn the relationship I thought we had. But you? The real you? The one who lies and cheats and spends thousands on another woman while telling his wife they need to budget? I don’t miss you at all. I don’t even know who you are.”
He left. I never saw him again.
—
One year later, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Chicago’s Loop, reading a book and drinking a latte, when my phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.
Hi Clara, this is Victoria. I hope it’s okay that I’m reaching out. I got your number from a mutual acquaintance. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. For everything. I didn’t know he was married. If I had known, I never would have… anyway. I hope you’re doing well. You deserved better than him. We both did.
I stared at the message for a long time, steam rising from my latte, the autumn sun streaming through the windows.
Then I typed back: Thank you for reaching out. I appreciate the apology. You’re right—we both deserved better. I hope you’re doing well too.
I hit send and set my phone down, feeling something settle in my chest. Not forgiveness exactly, but a kind of peace. A recognition that we’d both been caught in the same lie, just from different angles.
The truth is, I was doing well. Better than well, actually.
I’d gotten the promotion I’d been working toward. Senior Project Manager, with a team of six reporting to me and projects that actually mattered. I’d moved to a new apartment in River North with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the river. I’d reconnected with friends I’d let drift away during my marriage, rediscovered hobbies I’d abandoned, remembered who I was before I became half of “Ethan and Clara.”
I’d started therapy and learned about codependency, about boundaries, about how love shouldn’t require you to ignore your instincts or make yourself smaller. I’d learned that being alone was different from being lonely, that solitude could be a gift rather than a punishment.
I’d been on dates—some good, some terrible, none serious yet. And I was okay with that. For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t defining myself by whether someone loved me. I was building a life that was mine, completely and entirely mine.
Two years after seeing Ethan in Denver, I found myself back in that city for a work conference. Real work this time—three days of meetings and presentations and networking.
On my last afternoon, before my evening flight, I had a few free hours. On impulse, I took an Uber to Cherry Creek Shopping Center.
I walked through the same corridors where I’d seen Ethan and Victoria. The mall looked exactly the same—the same polished marble floors, the same expensive boutiques, the same soft jazz piping through hidden speakers.
But I felt completely different. Not angry. Not sad. Not haunted by ghosts of what I’d lost.
Just free.
I walked into the boutique where Ethan had bought Victoria that $4,200 dress. A saleswoman approached with a professional smile.
“Can I help you find something?”
“Actually, yes,” I said. “I’m looking for a dress. Something special.”
“What’s the occasion?”
I smiled. “No occasion. I just want something that makes me feel beautiful.”
She showed me options. I tried on six dresses, each one more expensive than anything I’d bought for myself in years. I settled on a deep emerald green silk dress that fit perfectly, that made me feel powerful and elegant and entirely myself.
It cost $3,800.
I bought it without hesitation, without guilt, without checking my bank balance or wondering if I should save the money for something more practical.
At the register, the saleswoman carefully folded the dress in tissue paper and placed it in a bag with the same gold-leaf logo I’d seen Ethan carrying two years ago.
“Is this a gift?” she asked as she processed my card.
“Yes,” I said. “For me. From me.”
She smiled. “The best kind.”
I walked out of Cherry Creek Shopping Center carrying my expensive bag, and I thought about Ethan carrying a similar bag two years ago, buying something for someone who wasn’t his wife, living a life built on lies and stolen weekends.
But this time, the woman in the expensive dress was me.
And the person who’d paid for it was also me.
And that felt exactly, perfectly right.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.