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I begged him to speak.
He stayed stone.
Resentment built, layer by layer, until our marriage felt sealed in cement.
Eventually, it broke.
We divorced.
He remarried.
Grief carried us in opposite directions, as it often does when it has nowhere to breathe.
Then one morning, the phone rang.
Sam was gone. Sudden. No warning. No chance to mend the fractures left behind.
Days after his funeral, his new wife came to see me.
She sat at my kitchen table, hands trembling around a cup of untouched tea.
For a long moment, silence.
Then, in a voice barely holding together, she said:
“There’s something you deserve to know.”
My chest tightened.
I braced myself.
She told me Sam did cry—just not where anyone could see.
The night our son died, he drove to the lake they loved.
The place of fishing, skipping stones, talking about school.
Their place.
And then she said the words that undid me:
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