I was devastated.
The weeks that followed blurred together — paperwork, moving boxes, sleepless nights.
For a while, I barely recognized the person staring back at me in the mirror.
Eventually, though, I stopped hunting for an explanation and started pouring my energy back into my own life.
I took a walk every morning.
I called old friends.
I even opened my laptop one night and looked at code for the first time in twenty years, and my hands remembered it like a language you dream in.
Three months passed.
Then one afternoon, while sorting through things in the garage — the house was mine in the settlement, the one thing I’d fought for — I came across a box that Gerald and I had both completely forgotten about.
It was taped shut, the cardboard soft with age, and across the top, in my own handwriting from twenty-two years ago, it said: LAKESIDE — ORIGINAL FILES.
