I froze when a woman handed me a missing person flyer with my husband’s face on it. How could the man I’ve lived with for ten years be someone else’s lost husband and father? Nothing made sense, every memory felt like a lie, and it only got stranger when I confronted my husband.
I’d been running errands all morning — you know the drill. Weekend grocery shopping, dropping off clothes at the dry cleaner, a quick trip to the bank… the kind of mindless tasks that need to be done but don’t really accomplish anything meaningful. All I wanted was to head home and relax.
Maybe watch a movie or read another chapter of my book club book. But first, I was going to get myself a vanilla latte. I’d earned it.
The sidewalk buzzed with the usual crowd of college students with backpacks and tourists consulting maps. I was almost at the coffee shop when I noticed the woman standing in front of the community bulletin board. She was stapling flyers to the board with mechanical precision, but her movements were tired, defeated, like someone going through motions they’d repeated a thousand times before.
As I walked past, she turned and pressed a flyer into my hand. “Have you seen my missing husband?” she asked, the words coming out flat, like a recording that had played so many times the life had drained right out of it. She didn’t even look at my face when she said it.
Just handed me the flyer and turned away, already moving down the sidewalk. It broke my heart a little. How long had she been searching for this man to have grown so hopeless?
And yet, part of her must’ve still believed she could find him. Why else would she be handing out flyers? I glanced down at the paper as I stepped toward the coffee shop entrance and froze in my tracks.
Someone bumped into me, but I barely noticed. The missing man pictured on the flyer was my husband. He was a lot younger, but it was undeniable.
This man had Daniel’s eyes, Daniel’s lopsided smile, and a scar above his left eyebrow exactly like the one Daniel had. I turned and looked around for the woman who’d given me the flyer. I wanted to run after her, grab her shoulders, and demand answers, but she’d disappeared into the crowd, swallowed up by the stream of people moving down the sidewalk.
I read the flyer again, slower this time:
MISSING PERSON
Name: Michael
Last seen: May 17, 2010
Description: 5’10”, brown hair, brown eyes, scar above left eyebrow
Clothing: Blue polo shirt, dark jeans
Details: Michael went missing while traveling for work. He is deeply loved and missed by his wife and son. If you have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact Lena.
The words didn’t compute. Loved and missed… by a wife and son. “Michael” was the name on the flyer.
I looked at the picture again. The name might be different, but that was definitely Daniel. I pulled out my phone with trembling fingers and hurried back to my car with the flyer clutched against my chest.
Sitting behind the wheel, I spread the flyer on the passenger seat and Googled the name and other details. My heart hammered as the results loaded. “It has to be a prank,” I muttered.
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