I Hate Old Things
Part One: 2:13 A.M.
At exactly 2:13 in the morning, my phone lit up on the nightstand. I was already awake, lying on my side of the bed and staring at the ceiling fan, wondering why Ethan hadn’t called. He’d been gone four days, and he hadn’t called once. For one foolish second, when I saw his name on the screen, I thought my husband might finally be checking on me.
But the message erased nineteen years of marriage in three brutal sentences.
Be gone when we return. I hate old things. I work hard, so I deserve a new life.
Before I could fully take it in, another message appeared beneath it.
Don’t embarrass yourself. The kids will be with us.
I put the phone back on the nightstand, face down, and stared into the dark. The ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, the same fan my father installed for us in 2007, the summer we moved in. The house creaked the way it always did on cool nights, the old beams settling. Somewhere on the other side of the world, on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, my husband was preparing to marry a twenty-six-year-old woman while I lay alone in the house where we’d raised our children, expected to vanish before he got home.
I hate old things. I read it again in my head. I was forty-four. I suppose that made me one of them.
My name is Caroline Pierce, and until three weeks before that message, I believed I had a solid, ordinary marriage. Not a perfect one. I’d stopped believing in perfect around year six. But a marriage with a foundation, the kind you don’t think about because you assume it’ll hold.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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