Everything felt so frustratingly normal. I was actually having a good time, momentarily forgetting the dark cloud hovering over my marriage. Then, she reached into a worn manila envelope and pulled out a stack of older Polaroids.

She flipped through them, pausing on one before holding it up to the overhead chandelier light.

“Oh, wow,” she murmured, a complex look crossing her face. “That’s your father’s first wife,” she said, handing the photo across the table to Mark. “Evelyn. Long before he met me. Isn’t she gorgeous? It broke his heart into a million pieces when she left him.”

I leaned over Mark’s shoulder to look at the photograph. The air completely left the room, and I felt the floor drop out from underneath my feet. The woman in the photo was young, stunning, and standing in a sunlit garden with her hair blowing in the wind. She had long, dark hair parted down the middle. She had my exact jawline, my eye shape, my nose.

Because the woman smiling in that vintage photograph could have been my identical twin.

A cold sweat broke out across my entire body. My ears started ringing loudly, drowning out the sound of my mother-in-law’s voice. I stared at the photo, and then I looked at Mark. His face was entirely devoid of color. He wasn’t looking at the picture; he was looking at me, his eyes wide with a sudden, naked panic. He knew that I knew. He could see the recognition clicking into place behind my eyes.

The sick, twisted reality of my life washed over me. Mark wasn’t pining after an ex-girlfriend. He was obsessed with a phantom—his father’s runaway first wife. A woman he had likely never even met, or only knew as a mythic, beautiful ghost in his childhood home who had destroyed his father.

He had grown up romanticizing her, fixating on her image in hidden attic boxes, developing a deeply disturbed obsession with the woman who ruined his dad. And then, he found me. A woman who looked exactly like her.

“I’m feeling a bit unwell,” I managed to choke out, pushing my chair back from the table so violently it scraped harshly against the hardwood floor.

I didn’t wait for a response. I practically ran upstairs. I didn’t go to the bedroom; I went straight to the hall closet and pulled down my large suitcase. My hands were moving on autopilot, throwing clothes, shoes, and toiletries into the bag in a frantic, unorganized mess.

About ten minutes later, I heard the front door close downstairs. His mother had left early, likely sensing the sudden, toxic shift in the atmosphere. Heavy footsteps slowly climbed the stairs. Mark stood in the doorway of the bedroom, watching me pack. He didn’t try to stop me. He just looked completely defeated, like a man waking up from a very long, very deep sleep.

“How long have you known?” he asked softly, his voice trembling.

“I found the journal three months ago,” I said, zipping the suitcase shut with a sharp, aggressive yank. I finally looked him in the eye, refusing to let my tears fall. “Behind the water heater. The entry from our wedding day.”

Mark let out a broken, pathetic sound and slumped against the doorframe, burying his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into his palms. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just… I saw you at that coffee shop, and it was like she stepped right out of the photographs. It was a compulsion. I couldn’t help myself.”

“A compulsion?” I laughed, a harsh, humorless sound that felt foreign in my own throat. “You didn’t marry a woman, Mark. You cast a role in some sick psychological play about your father’s past. I am a living, breathing person. Not a doll for you to dress up in Evelyn’s perfume and Evelyn’s hairstyle.”

“I love you,” he pleaded, stepping forward, his eyes begging me to understand something completely unhinged. “I do love you. The journal… that was just my own stupid thoughts. You became real to me.”

“I was never real to you,” I said coldly, grabbing the handle of my suitcase. “You wrote it yourself. I’m just the shadow. And the shadow is officially leaving.”

I walked past him, my shoulder hard against his chest as I moved through the doorway. I didn’t look back as I went down the stairs, and I didn’t hesitate as I walked out the front door into the cool night air. I don’t know where I’m going to go from here, or how long it will take to scrub the feeling of his manufactured love off my skin. But as I drove away from the house, I adjusted my rearview mirror, looked at my own face, and promised myself one thing: Tomorrow, I am cutting my hair.