The silence in our house had been flatlined for a long time. I came home yesterday to find my wife of 10 years packing her bags. When I asked, “Where are you going?”, she looked at me with a coldness I didn’t recognize.
“To Las Vegas!” she declared. “I found out that there are men that will pay me $500 cash to do what I do for you for free!”. I pondered that for a moment, thinking about our bank account and the inheritance I had never touched. Then, I began packing my bags too. She stopped and demanded, “What do you think you are doing?”.
“I’m coming with you,” I said. “I want to see how you’re going to live on a thousand dollars a year.”
But the joke fell flat. The truth was, she wasn’t going for the money; she was going because grief is a kind of disease for which no cure can be found. Ever since we lost her mother, she felt an absence that made life and its living prove harder than usual. She missed the comfort of an embrace and the soothing of a voice that I could no longer provide.
We ended up at a resort, not in Vegas, but near where my friend Phil was throwing a surprise engagement party. The flight was unbearable due to a man in business class who yelled at a mom and threw sauce at a flight attendant, only to be silenced by a 14-year-old boy. That boy reminded me that sometimes we need a modern-day village looking out for us.
At the resort, my wife’s plan unraveled. She met a woman named Jenna, a known scammer who had previously divided an inheritance into categories like “Car, investments, vacation” without her partner’s consent. Jenna was trying to convince my wife to leave me for good. We also saw a mother named Sandy being denied by security at her own son’s wedding because Jenna had brainwashed him.
Seeing Jenna’s cruelty—how she dumped her daughter Harriet at a grandmother’s house because she didn’t fit into her new life—snapped my wife back to reality. She realized that real love doesn’t pick favorites and that what we had for ten years was worth more than any Vegas fantasy.
We joined the “village” at the resort to stop Jenna’s latest scam. I pushed past the wedding planner and helped expose Jenna’s lies. We even helped a young mother whose husband was being pressured to abandon their newborn triplets.
That night, my wife and I sat on the beach. She apologized for the packing. I told her that every day i walk this earth, i am proof that her love lives inside of me. We realized that while she birthed our life together, the village we found at that resort saved it.
In memory and dream I am returned to you, returned home. I knew then that in the memory of my heart our forever continues.
