The receipt in my jacket pocket wasn’t mine… But my husband’s signature was at the bottom.
Sarah stared at the notification on her phone. The family tracking app showed Michael at the grocery store, but his car was still in their driveway.
She walked to the window. His sedan sat exactly where he’d parked it that morning.
The app refreshed. Still at Miller’s Market, two miles away.
“Maybe it’s glitching,” she whispered, but her hands were already shaking.
She grabbed her keys and drove to the store. Michael’s phone signal pulsed from the parking lot, but his car wasn’t there.
Sarah called him. It went straight to voicemail.
She walked through every aisle. No Michael. No explanation.
The signal grew stronger near the dumpsters behind the building. Sarah’s breath caught in her throat.
There, half-buried under cardboard boxes, was Michael’s phone. The screen was cracked, but it was still pinging their location.
“Looking for this?”
Sarah spun around. Michael stood ten feet away, holding a different phone.
“I needed some space,” he said quietly. “To think.”
“So you faked your location? Made me think you were missing?”
“I’ve been walking. For hours. I couldn’t face coming home and pretending everything was normal.”
Sarah’s anger dissolved into something colder. “What’s not normal, Michael?”
He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “I got the test results back yesterday.”
The medical letterhead made her stomach drop.
“The fertility specialist called. It’s not me, Sarah. It never was.”
She stared at the paper, then at his face. “You’ve known this whole time that I was the reason we couldn’t have kids?”
“No. I just found out. But I’ve been lying about the appointments. Missing them. Because I was scared it would be me.”
Sarah felt the ground shift beneath her feet. “So while I blamed myself for three years, you were just… avoiding the truth?”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked at his broken phone in her hands, then at the man she thought she knew.
“I’m going home,” she said. “Don’t follow me.”
Sarah drove away, leaving Michael standing alone in the empty parking lot. The tracking app finally showed two separate locations: her moving toward home, him staying perfectly still.
