My Wife's Faked Death

At sixty-six, lying in a hospice bed, my breath a shallow rasp, I faced the end of a lifetime of thankless labor. My estranged daughter stood by, refusing eye contact, when she announced, "You have a visitor." The door opened, and in walked a woman older, impeccably dressed-my wife, Jenny, who had supposedly died in a fiery car crash forty years ago. She thanked me for raising Stella and caring for her parents, then offered a condescending "donation" to cover my burial costs. The betrayal, forty years old, ripped through me like a fresh wound, knowing my daughter was in on the lie, my whole life a bitter joke. My heart seized, the world went dark, and the monitor beside my bed screamed its frantic protest. Then, light. I gasped, shooting upright, my heart strong, my hands calloused and young. I wasn' t in a hospice; I was in my own bedroom, 26 again, clutching Jenny' s crumpled "suicide note." She was gone, but not dead. This time, I' d make her "death" real.