While her husband lies unconscious after a serious fall, Renee discovers a never-sent love letter revealing a secret affair that had apparently already ended months before his accident.
My name is Renee. My husband Carl and I have been married fourteen years and live in Akron, Ohio.
I’d been at the hospital for six straight days by the time I finally went home to grab a change of clothes. Carl was still unconscious in the ICU after a fall in the bathroom that had left him with a head injury severe enough that the doctors were using words like “uncertain timeline” and “wait and see” instead of anything resembling a real prognosis.
I went into his home office looking for the folder with his insurance information, certain I’d seen it in the bottom drawer of his desk at some point over our fourteen years of marriage. Instead I found, tucked beneath a stack of old tax documents, a sealed envelope addressed to a name I didn’t recognize. A woman’s name. The handwriting unmistakably Carl’s. The seal unbroken, meaning whatever was inside had been written and never actually sent.
I stood in that office for a long time before I let myself open it, some instinct telling me that once I did, there would be no version of the next several weeks that looked anything like what I’d been preparing myself for in that hospital room.
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