Then, he uttered three words that effectively ended her world.
“Is this true?”
Thirty-six hours prior, I had been sitting in a dimly lit roadside diner off Interstate 10, staring at those very same documents the judge was now holding.
The coffee sitting in front of me had long since gone cold, a dark, stagnant pool. The eggs I’d ordered sat untouched, slowly congealing on the ceramic plate. Reality felt like it was slipping away. The neon sign in the window buzzed incessantly, the waitress shared a laugh with a regular, and cars sped by on the highway—but I was trapped in a bubble of catastrophic realization.
Three children. Fifteen years of marriage. My entire adult existence.
It was all a lie.
The private investigator sitting across from me was a man named Clyde Barrow. He’d heard every joke about the name. He was in his sixties, with a face like cured leather and eyes that had witnessed enough human depravity to never be surprised again.
“I’m truly sorry, Crawford,” he said, his voice as rough as low-grit sandpaper. “I know this isn’t the outcome you were hoping for.”
“I wasn’t hoping for anything,” I whispered. “I was just hoping you’d tell me I was being paranoid. That the rumors were baseless. That my wife wasn’t…”
I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.
