I snapped the picture, standing beside the truck, and sent it off without much thought—just a way to share a part of my day.
But when his reply came back almost instantly, it wasn’t what I expected.
“Who’s that in the reflection?”
I blinked, confused. “What reflection?” I texted back, feeling a knot form in my stomach.
“The rear window. There’s someone there,” he replied, more serious than I anticipated.
My heart raced. I opened the picture again, zooming in on the rear window. At first, I thought it was glare or a tree. But as I looked closer, my stomach dropped. A figure stood behind me. Faint, but there. A man—with a hat casting a shadow over his face.
The hat. I knew that hat. My ex’s hat.
I was alone when I took that picture… wasn’t I? The field was empty. But the reflection didn’t lie.
“That doesn’t look like a tree,” my husband texted again. “It looks like him.”
The photo became a wedge of doubt, a door to the past we couldn’t close. And I wasn’t sure we ever would.
