Twenty-Five Years a Stand-In Wife

My son brought home a girlfriend who looked exactly like my husband's first love.

"Mom, even her name carries Dad's surname."

He said it with the eager pride of someone showing off a prize.

The girl watched me, smiling, and everywhere I looked I saw the ghost of someone from long ago.

A shiver ran through me. I stood frozen where I was.

In high school I was a dim, unwanted thing.

And yet later I took the dazzling, brilliant Walter Swanson away from the girl he'd grown up beside.

I married him.

Twenty-five years later.

The reckoning had finally come.