When I came home from a week-long work trip and found a hundred roses covering my front porch, I assumed someone was trying to steal my wife. Then I found the note that changed everything.
I knew something was wrong before I even turned off the engine.
For seven years, whenever I came home from a work trip, my wife Jane was always on the porch before I finished pulling into the driveway. Sometimes she waved with both hands like I had been gone for months instead of five days. Sometimes she stood there barefoot in one of my old sweaters, smiling as if the entire house had been waiting to breathe again. It was the kind of welcome that makes a man feel like he matters, the kind you stop noticing until it disappears.
This time, the porch was empty.
“Jane?” I muttered, leaning forward over the steering wheel.
Then I saw the flowers.
At first, I thought there were maybe five or six bouquets scattered near the front door, which would have been strange enough. But as my car rolled closer, I realized the porch was covered in roses. Red ones, pink ones, yellow ones, white ones, all wrapped in paper and ribbon and clear plastic that glistened in the late afternoon sun. There had to be at least a hundred of them, stacked in uneven rows that stretched from the welcome mat all the way to the porch swing where Jane usually sat with her coffee on school mornings.
I parked too sharply, grabbed my bag from the passenger seat, and stepped out slowly.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
The sweet smell hit me before I reached the steps, thick and overwhelming, the kind of fragrance that should have felt romantic but instead made my stomach tighten. I stood on the bottom step and counted in my head, then stopped counting because the number kept climbing.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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