The Eight-Hour Charade
Every morning, my husband wakes up at 6:30 AM. He showers, shaves, and puts on his expensive Italian suit. He kisses me goodbye, grabs his briefcase, and tells me he has a busy day of meetings ahead as a VP of Finance. I never doubted him. He's always been ambitious, driven, and successful. But lately, I noticed little things—his shoes were scuffed with dirt, not office carpet. His tan was deepening, despite him supposedly being under fluorescent lights all day.
Yesterday, driven by a nagging intuition, I decided to follow him. I stayed three cars back as he drove toward the city. But he didn't take the exit for the Financial District. Instead, he pulled into the public parking lot of the city park.
"I watched him for four hours. He just sat there, feeding pigeons and staring at nothing."
He took off his suit jacket, loosened his tie, and sat on a wooden bench. He pulled a sandwich out of his briefcase—not files, not a laptop, just a sandwich and a flask. He sat there for eight hours. When I confronted him that evening, the dam broke. He confessed everything through tears of shame.
He had been fired two years ago. He was too embarrassed to tell me, too proud to admit failure. To keep up the facade of his salary and our lifestyle, he had been slowly draining our retirement accounts and spending our savings. We are months away from bankruptcy, and the man I thought was a titan of industry is actually a broken man feeding birds to pass the time.
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