The notification sound arrived punctually, as it did every first day of the month at nine in the morning. I didn’t need to look at my phone screen to know what it was; my bank was informing me that the $300 transfer had been successful. The recipient: Doña Clara, my mother-in-law. Or rather, the mother of the woman who was my life, my world, and my deepest sorrow.
Five years, three months, and two days had passed since Marina left. I didn’t like using the word “death,” even though the reality of her cold marble tomb was undeniable. For me, she had simply vanished, leaving an empty space in the bed and a deafening silence in the house we bought with so many dreams.
Marina died in a car accident while traveling to visit her family in a coastal town, about six hours from our city. The police report was brief, the coffin arrived closed due to the severity of the impact, and the funeral was a blur of grief-stricken faces and hugs I didn’t feel. The only thing I remember clearly is Doña Clara, her mother, a small, frail woman, weeping inconsolably, clinging to my arm as if I were the last pillar holding up her world.
In the midst of that shared grief, I made a promise. Marina always worried about her mother; Doña Clara was a widow, lived on a meager pension, and was in frail health. “If anything happens to me, take care of her,” Marina had once told me, half-jokingly, half-seriously. Standing before the grave, with the earth still fresh, I swore to the old woman that she would never want for anything.
“I’ll take care of you, Doña Clara,” I said, drying her tears with my own trembling hands. “Every month I’ll send you money for your medicine and food. It’s what Marina would have wanted.”
She nodded gratefully and returned to her village. From then on, religiously, those $300 came out of my account. It wasn’t a fortune, but for me it was a sacred tithe, an invisible thread that still tied me to my wife’s memory. Paying that money made me feel like I was still a good husband, that I was still honoring her memory. It was my way of saying to the universe, “Look, I still love her, I still take care of what’s hers.”
My friends kept telling me it was enough. “Roberto, it’s been five years,” Jorge, my best friend, would say as we shared a beer. “You’re young, you have to rebuild your life. That woman isn’t your eternal responsibility.” “It’s not about her, Jorge. It’s about Marina,” I’d reply, always with the same stubbornness.
But life, capricious and wise, has strange ways of shaking us up when we get too comfortable in pain.
Everything changed one ordinary Tuesday. I received a letter from the bank, but it wasn’t a normal statement. There was a problem with Doña Clara’s receiving account. Apparently, the branch in her town had closed, and they needed to update the information to continue allowing international or interbank transfers of that type. I tried calling Doña Clara on her landline, but it was out of service. I tried the cell phone I had given her two years ago, and it went straight to voicemail.
A strange unease settled in my chest. It wasn’t worry, it was something more visceral, like a feeling that makes the skin on the back of your neck crawl. What if something had happened to her? What if she was sick and alone? I hadn’t really spoken to her in months; our conversations had been limited to brief thank-you messages.
I looked at the calendar. I had a few vacation days accumulated that my boss kept urging me to take. I glanced at my car keys on the table. “Why not?” I told myself. “I’ll go see her. I’ll sort out the bank thing in person, make sure she’s okay, and while I’m there, I’ll visit the place where Marina grew up. Maybe it’ll be the closure I need to finally start letting go.”
I didn’t know that this trip wouldn’t be an ending, but a brutal opening to a reality I never imagined. I packed a small suitcase, bought some supplies I knew Doña Clara liked—chocolates, good quality coffee, some cans of imported preserves—and hit the road.
The journey was long and lonely. As the miles ticked by, my mind replayed the film of my marriage. I remembered Marina’s laughter, the way she tilted her head when she listened to music, the vanilla scent of her hair. I cried a little, as I often did in the solitude of the car, allowing myself the vulnerability I hid from the world.
I arrived in the village at dusk. It was a picturesque place, with cobbled streets and low houses painted in bright colors, but with that air of slow decay that places forgotten by progress possess. I hadn’t been there since the funeral, which was held in the local church before her burial in the village cemetery, according to her mother’s wishes.
I headed to the address I had saved in my memory: Calle Las Flores, number 42.
When I arrived, I was confused. I remembered Doña Clara’s house as a humble dwelling with a faded facade and a small, neglected garden. But what I saw was very different. House number 42 had been freshly painted a bright yellow. The garden was immaculate, full of rose bushes and bougainvillea. There was a new wooden fence and, most surprisingly, a nearly new sedan parked in the driveway.
I checked the GPS. Yes, it was the right address. “Maybe the $300 a month went a long way here,” I thought, trying to justify the upgrade. Perhaps Doña Clara was an exceptional manager.
I got out of the car with the gift bags, suddenly feeling like an intruder. I rang the doorbell. I expected to see the hunched old woman with her cane and sad eyes. But no one answered. I rang again. I heard laughter inside. Children’s laughter, and a woman’s voice. A voice that chilled me to the bone.
I froze, my hand in the air. That laugh. I could recognize it among a million laughs. It was a tinkling sound, ending in a small sigh. “It can’t be,” I told myself. “Grief is making you hallucinate, Roberto. You’re tired.”
The door burst open.
It wasn’t Doña Clara who appeared. It was a child. A child of about four years old, with curly hair and large, dark eyes. He looked at me curiously, holding a plastic toy. “Who are you?” he asked.
Before he could answer, a woman shouted from inside. “Mateo, don’t open the door without asking!”
And then she went out into the hallway, drying her hands on a dish towel. Time stood still. The world stopped turning. The birds fell silent. My heart lurched so violently that I felt a physical pain in my chest.
There, three meters away from me, was Marina.
Not a ghost. Not a memory. Marina. Flesh and blood. Her hair was shorter, she was a little fuller, wearing a simple house dress. But it was her. Her eyes, her mouth, that small scar on her chin she’d gotten as a child. She looked up and her eyes met mine. The color drained from her face in a second. The dish towel fell to the floor. “Roberto?” she whispered, her voice a thread that sounded like shattering glass.
I couldn’t breathe. The shopping bags slipped from my hands. The cans rolled across the entryway floor, making a metallic clang that broke the trance, but not the horror. “Marina?” I managed to say. My voice sounded distant, detached.
She backed away, bumping into the hallway wall, as if she’d seen a monster. “No… you shouldn’t be here,” she stammered, her eyes wide with panic.
At that moment, Doña Clara appeared in the kitchen doorway. She looked older, but healthy. When she saw me, she put her hands to her mouth and let out a stifled cry. “Oh, my God!”
The scene was grotesque. My dead wife, standing before me, alive. Her mother, the destitute widow I supported, complicit in this macabre charade. And a child. A child clinging to Marina’s leg and calling her “Mama.”
“What does this mean?” I asked. The initial shock was giving way to a cold, volcanic fury that was beginning to rise from my feet. “I buried you! I cried over your coffin! I’ve been paying for your memory for five years!”
Marina began to cry. It wasn’t the dignified crying I remembered; it was crying with guilt, with shame, the cry of someone caught in the worst kind of betrayal. “Roberto, please, go. I can explain, but not here, not in front of the child,” she pleaded.
“You’re going to explain this to me right now!” I shouted, and the boy started crying, terrified. A man came out of one of the rooms. A tall, burly fellow with a stern face. He stood protectively in front of Marina. “What’s going on here? Who is this man, Marina?” She stopped him, placing a hand on her chest. “This is Roberto, Carlos. He’s… my ex-husband.”
“Ex-husband.” The word hit me harder than the news of her death years ago. “Ex-husband?” I laughed, a hysterical, bitter laugh. “I’m your widower, Marina. Or so I thought until ten seconds ago.”
This Carlos guy looked at me, confused, then at Marina, and seemed to understand something I hadn’t quite grasped yet. “Is this the guy with the money?” he asked disdainfully. Marina nodded, lowering her head.
Everything fell into place in my mind like pieces of a poisoned puzzle. I entered the house without knocking. I needed to sit down. My legs felt like they wouldn’t hold me up. I sank down onto a sofa that, ironically, looked very similar to the one we had in our old home.
“Speak,” I ordered Marina. She sent the boy to the other room with his grandmother. Carlos stayed there, arms crossed, looking at me suspiciously but not intervening.
Marina sat down in a chair across from me, not daring to meet my gaze. “I… I wasn’t happy, Roberto,” she began, her voice trembling. “I felt suffocated. Your life, your job, the city… everything was perfect for you, but I felt like I was dead inside. I wanted to leave, I wanted to go back to my village, to my simple life.” “And that’s why you faked your death?” I asked, incredulous at such cowardice. “Couldn’t you have asked for a divorce? Couldn’t you have just left?”
“You shouldn’t have let me go,” she said, looking up with a mixture of defiance and sadness. “You were so… intense. So perfect. Everyone loved you. If I left you, I’d be the villain. The ungrateful woman who left the perfect man. I didn’t have the courage to face that. And then… I met Carlos. I got pregnant.”
I looked toward the door through which the boy had left. Mateo. Four years old. The timeline matched. “The accident…” I murmured. “There wasn’t an accident. I mean, there was one on the road that day, a car caught fire. I took advantage of the confusion. I paid someone at the local morgue, an acquaintance of my mother’s, to identify an unclaimed body as mine. It was… easier than you’d think in a town like this where everything is fixed with money and favors.” “And the closed coffin?” “It was necessary. So you wouldn’t see it wasn’t me.”
I felt nauseous. A deep, existential nausea. I had cried over an empty coffin or, worse, over the body of a stranger. “And you?” I addressed the mother, who had returned to the living room without the child. “Doña Clara. I comforted her. I promised to take care of her. You looked me in the eyes and cried with me.” The old woman had the decency to blush, but kept her chin held high. “A mother will do anything for her daughter, Roberto. Marina was desperate. And… well, the money you sent was very helpful. With it, we finished the house, bought the car so Carlos could work as a taxi driver… We thought that since you had a good job, you wouldn’t need it.”
There it was. The stark truth. Not only had they emotionally deceived me, but they’d also used me as their personal ATM. Those $300 a month, which I sent with so much love and sacrifice, sometimes depriving myself of luxuries to keep my promise, had financed the happy new life of my “deceased” wife and her lover.
I looked around. The flat-screen TV. The new furniture. My money. My pain turned into their comfort. “You know,” I said, slowly standing up. The fury had given way to crystal clarity. “For five years, I’ve blamed myself. I blamed myself for not going with you that day. I blamed myself for not telling you ‘I love you’ enough that morning. I’ve lived in a prison of guilt and sadness. I’ve turned down wonderful women because I felt like I was betraying you.”
Marina wept silently. Carlos stared at the floor, uncomfortable. “I thought I loved you more than anything,” I continued, looking at her intently. “But now I realize that I loved a woman who didn’t exist. I loved an idea. You… you’re just a selfish, cowardly stranger.”
I walked toward the door. “Roberto, wait,” Marina said, taking a step toward me. “What are you going to do? Are you going to report us? We could go to jail for fraud. We have a child… please.”
I stopped in the doorway. The sun was setting, painting the sky blood red. I looked at my car, my escape route. I could have gone to the police. I could have ruined their lives the way they ruined mine. I could have demanded every penny back. I had every right. But I looked at the child, peeking his head through the doorway, looking at me innocently. It wasn’t his fault his parents were scum.
And then I looked at myself. I felt… light. For the first time in five years, the weight of mourning had vanished. There was no ghost anymore. No tragedy. Just a charade that had come to an end.
I turned around one last time. “I’m not going to report you,” I said. Their faces lit up with relief. “Not because I pity you, but because I want nothing more to do with you. You don’t deserve another minute of my time, another ounce of my energy.”
I took my phone out of my pocket. I opened the bank app. In front of them, I canceled the scheduled transfer. “The money’s gone. The lie’s over. For me, Marina died today. But this time, I’m not going to cry. This time, I’m going to celebrate.”
Doña Clara tried to say something, perhaps another excuse, but I ignored her. I left the house, walked to my car, and got in. As I started the engine, I saw Marina in the rearview mirror, standing in the doorway, watching me drive away. She no longer seemed beautiful to me. She just seemed small, dull, and pathetic. She had stayed in her village, clinging to her lie, dependent on the money of a man who was dead to them.
I, on the other hand, was alive. I drove back to the city with the windows down, letting the night wind hit my face. I blasted music. Not sad songs, but rock and roll, loud and vibrant. I got home in the early hours, exhausted but euphoric. I went into my bedroom, picked up the photo of Marina that I had on my nightstand, the one where she was smiling in her wedding dress. I looked at it for a second. I no longer felt pain. Only indifference. I threw it in the trash.
The next morning, I called Jorge. “Is that invitation to go out this weekend still on?” I asked. “Roberto! Of course it is!” he replied, surprised. “What happened? You sound… different.” “What happened is that I finally buried my wife, Jorge. For real. Now I’m truly free.”
That day, the sun shone brighter than ever. I had my whole life ahead of me and an extra $300 each month to spend on myself, on my dreams, on someone who truly deserved my love. I learned that sometimes, losing someone we love is a tragedy, but discovering who they really were… that, that can be the greatest blessing of all. Because the truth, even though it hurts like a knife, is the only thing that heals the wound forever.
And so, with a mended heart and a slightly fuller wallet, I began my new life. A life without ghosts, without emotional debts, and above all, without lies.
