Twenty-Five Years a Stand-In Wife

My son brought home a girlfriend who looked exactly like my husband's first love.

"Mom, even her name carries Dad's surname."

He said it with the eager pride of someone showing off a prize.

The girl watched me, smiling, and everywhere I looked I saw the ghost of someone from long ago.

A shiver ran through me. I stood frozen where I was.

In high school I was a dim, unwanted thing.

And yet later I took the dazzling, brilliant Walter Swanson away from the girl he'd grown up beside.

I married him.

Twenty-five years later.

The reckoning had finally come.

Walter was thirty when he learned to keep his moods off his face.

But just now, I could read the excitement and the guilt in his eyes without trying.

My son pulled Davina Gilbert down into a chair at the dining table.

"Mom, the two of us have this real connection."

"I take after Dad, and Davina was raised by her mother alone, but our interests, our whole outlook on life, we match perfectly."

When Davina spoke of her mother, her gaze slid off me.

"My mom didn't always have to raise me by herself."

"When she was young she had someone she loved, but after she went abroad to study, the man got fed up and married someone else. So out of spite she married my dad. The next year my dad died in an accident, and she's been single ever since."

She sighed.

"They say that man loved my mom so, so much. I wonder, if he knew how things are for her now, would he regret it?"

The words dropped like a heavy stone into the still water of my marriage.

Walter. Would he regret it?

I had just started to lift my head, to watch his reaction.

A voice message came through on Davina's phone.

"Walt, I miss you."

...

I didn't know whether Hilda Gilbert knew her daughter was in my home.

That one word, Walt, soft with longing and devotion.

And just like that, the easy, practiced way Walter pulled out the chair to sit beside me, that motion caught, stalled for a moment.

It dragged me through the rest of the meal tasting nothing.

Until Walter offered to take Davina home, and without thinking, I moved to stop him.

"Mom, I've got an online meeting in a bit, and you can't drive. What's the problem with letting Dad take her?"

My son's irritated voice struck straight at something deep in me.

Yes. What was the problem.

A long time ago, the seat beside Walter belonged to Hilda Gilbert and no one else.

In high school, the back row.

Walter's brazen words, loud enough for the whole class to hear.

"I know I'm good-looking, and I know how to behave myself. Don't anyone bother trying to get close."

"Sweetheart, the seat next to me is yours forever."

Once it was Hilda Gilbert. Now it was her daughter.

Walter watched me in silence as I stepped aside.

Half an hour round trip.

I cleared the table and went to bed.

I waited three hours before Walter came home.

He carried the scent of gardenias.

The flower Hilda Gilbert used to love.

He didn't seem to notice I was only pretending to sleep.

He showered, lay down beside me, and his breathing settled into something even and deep soon enough.

After fifty.

A lot of couples start sleeping in separate beds.

He knew about my nightmares, and Walter had never once suggested it, and I had let myself feel quietly smug about that, all the way to fifty-five.

But that night, for the first time in a long while, I slept badly.

At breakfast the next morning, Walter put on a suit for the first time since he'd retired.

He typed on his phone the whole time he ate, and only when he stood to leave did he say it.

"Ann Fox, I've decided to take the rehire offer."

I looked up, puzzled, and found him studying me the same way.

"Will you come too?"

Last month the company's rehire email had both our names on it.

I had no intention of going back. The older I got, the more I'd started to flinch at the sound of engines.

But after he retired, Walter went to the park in the mornings and came home at night.

The hours we spent together were fewer than the hours we'd once spent at the same company.

Back then I'd assumed he just couldn't adjust, and I'd urged him to take the rehire.

He frowned.

"I have my own plans."