When my husband and I met, he honestly told me that he had once been married, but his wife died in an accident. He said that he still struggles with her death, that itās a wound that doesnāt heal.
I felt sorry for him, understood his pain, and decided not to interfere with the past. It seemed to me that what mattered was what was happening between us now. We were in love, happy, and preparing for our wedding.
But all this time I couldnāt shake the thought: before becoming his wife, I needed to go to the grave of his first spouse, lay flowers, and ask forgiveness for taking her place.
I wanted to take this step honestly and humanely, so my conscience would be clear. But my husband kept saying it wasnāt necessary, that she herself wouldnāt have wanted anyone to remind him of the past. Outwardly, he tried to sound calm, but I felt a strange tension in his voice, as if he wasnāt just against it ā he was afraid of this visit.
I blamed it on painful memories, but the desire to go there only grew stronger. And one day I simply took flowers and went. Without telling him.
I approached the grave, prepared to put down the flowers ā and at that very moment saw the photograph on the tombstone. In the same second my hands went numb, the flowers fell, and my heart started pounding as if it were about to burst out. On the tombstone wasā¦ š²š±
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On the photograph was a womanā¦ who looked exactly like me.
The same eyes, the same facial features, even the hair and the smile ā everything, as if it were my own photo taken a few years ago.
A chill ran through me. I stared at the picture for a long time, trying to find at least some difference to convince myself it was just a coincidence. But the longer I looked, the more I understood: we looked too much alike, almost like twins.
From that moment on I couldnāt think about anything else. I began searching for information about her death, spoke with her distant relative, found old records, talked to neighbors.
And the deeper I dug, the more disturbing details surfaced. It turned out her death wasnāt that obvious. The āaccidentāā¦ was too strange.
There were many questions no one had answers to, and no culprit was ever found. The case was closed too quickly, as if someone had benefited from making sure no one continued the investigation.
And hereās the most terrifying part. The more information I found, the clearer it became ā my husband didnāt just randomly end up with a woman who looked like his first wife.
He was looking for someone exactly like her. Deliberately. Purposefully.
And even worse, people who knew his first wife quietly, almost in a whisper, mentioned that before her death she had been very afraid of her husband.
They said he had become strange, obsessive, controlling. But no one had time to help her.
Gradually, a picture came together ā one that made my hands tremble. He didnāt lose his wife in an accident. He got rid of her. And all this time he had been searching for a woman who would look exactly the same.
Me.
