I dropped the paper. It fluttered to the floor like a wounded bird. I sat down on the edge of the bed and covered my mouth with my hands.

The man who came home to me thirty years ago wasn’t the man I had married.

I realized it then, with a terrifying, absolute clarity. That’s why he read the book. He wasn’t reading it for the story. He was reading it to remind himself how to act. He was studying the lines. He was trying to figure out how to be the husband I deserved, using a character in a book as his guide.

He had been living a lie for thirty years. He had spent his whole life trying to be the man I thought he was, but he never managed to reach the end of the story. He kept getting stuck on that one page. That one moment where the stranger realizes the mask is slipping.

I looked back at the book on the bed. Forty-one tallies. Forty-one times he had tried to reconcile who he was with the man I needed him to be. And every single night, he got to page 204 and he just… he couldn’t go any further.

He wasn’t keeping track of how many times he read the book. He was keeping track of how many times he failed to become the man who came home from the war.

I looked at his picture on the dresser, the one taken before he went away. He looked so kind, so familiar. But now, all I could see was the distance in his eyes. He had been a stranger for three decades, and I had loved him every second of it.

I feel a strange, cold hollowness in my chest now. I don’t know who I am supposed to be angry at.

Him? For lying? Or myself? For never really looking closely enough to see that he was just acting?

I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The book is still sitting on the bed. I keep wanting to pick it up and burn it, but I find myself sitting here, staring at the cover instead. I keep wondering what it would have been like if he had just told me the truth that first night he came back.

Would I have stayed? Would I have understood?

I’ll never know. The secret is buried with him, and I am left here in this house, living with the ghost of a man I never actually knew. I just wish I hadn’t looked at page 204. I really, really wish I hadn’t looked.