The nights were the worst. That’s when the truth tried to escape.
For six months, I would wake up to Mark tossing and turning, muttering a single name into his pillow: Linda.
“Linda,” he would whisper. “Linda, please.”
I confronted him, of course. I shook him awake, demanding to know who she was. He would rub his eyes, looking exhausted and innocent.
“It’s just work, Sarah,” he insisted. “He swore it was a coworker he found annoying.“. He claimed she was incompetence personified, a woman who messed up spreadsheets and haunted his stress dreams. I wanted to believe him. After twenty-five years, you want to believe the man sleeping next to you isn’t dreaming of someone else. So, he called out another woman’s name in his sleep for months, and I let it go.
Then came the party.
It was our Silver Anniversary. On our 25th anniversary, he invited friends over. The house was filled with flowers, champagne, and the people who had watched our marriage endure for a quarter of a century. I felt beautiful. I felt secure. I thought we had made it.
Mark clinked his spoon against his champagne flute. The room went quiet. He stood up, looking handsome in his suit, beaming at me with what I thought was love.
“I want to make a toast,” he began, his voice booming with pride. “To the woman who has stood by me through thick and thin. To the love of my life.”
He raised his glass toward me. I smiled, tears pricking my eyes, ready to accept his devotion.
“To my beautiful wife,” he declared. “Linda.“.
The silence that followed was instant and violent. It sucked the air out of the room.
My smile froze. The guests shifted uncomfortably. Mark stood there, glass raised, smiling, waiting for applause that wasn’t coming. He didn’t even realize what he had said.
“My name is Sarah,” I whispered, the sound echoing in the quiet room.
He blinked. “What?”
“You called me Linda.”
The color drained from his face so fast he looked like a corpse. The “annoying coworker” defense evaporated in the heat of his public confession. You don’t toast your annoying coworker on your 25th wedding anniversary.
Linda was the mistress.
He had spent so much time living in two worlds, whispering her name in the dark and lying about it in the light, that his wires had finally crossed. He had forgotten who was who. In his mind, the lines between the wife he was performing for and the woman he was dreaming about had blurred until he couldn’t tell us apart.
I walked out of the party, leaving him standing there with his raised glass and his ruined life. He had tried to introduce the love of his life to his friends; he just forgot that I was supposed to be the only one in the room.
