I Never Questioned My Husband’s Summer Fishing Trips With His Buddies Until This Particular Year

Inside were dozens of photos. A marina restaurant decorated with white flowers and candles. An invoice from the jewelry store for a custom gold band, specially widened. A document titled Our Wedding, with a date three weeks away and a guest list that included half our friends. And one picture I couldn’t stop staring at: Steven, beaming, beside a woman in a long ivory wedding dress, her back turned to the camera.

I closed the laptop and sat on the floor until my legs went numb. I didn’t call Steven. I couldn’t. Exactly an hour later, the doorbell rang. Through the glass, I saw my younger sister, Paula, holding a long white garment bag over her arm. And when she smiled and lifted it, I recognized her shoes. They were the same silver heels the woman in the wedding dress had been wearing.

Adrian Vale
Adrian Vale studied English literature. He is a novelist. He writes atmospheric literary fiction, quiet, character-driven stories about people who drift out of their own lives and the strange, lingering things that find them afterward.

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