Between yesterday and tomorrow. That’s where I live now. Stranded, absolutely lost, because everything I thought was “yesterday” was a lie, and “tomorrow” is a gaping abyss I can’t even begin to imagine.
It started like the most beautiful story you could ever imagine. A love that felt predestined. We met, and it was like finding a missing piece of my soul. Every conversation flowed, every touch ignited, every future plan felt like breathing. We built our lives around each other, brick by brick, dream by dream. There was no “I,” only “we.” Our apartment, our shared meals, our silly inside jokes, the way we’d plan our entire week just to squeeze in an extra hour together. We talked about forever. We talked about names for kids we hadn’t even conceived yet. It was pure, unadulterated joy. It was everything.
Then, the cracks appeared. Small at first. A missed call here, a late night there. He was just busy with work, I’d tell myself. Under pressure. But the light in his eyes, the easy smile – they dimmed. He started spending more time on his phone, always just out of my sight. He’d jump if I walked into the room. A peculiar defensiveness would flare up if I asked about his day, about where he’d been. The excuses became more elaborate, the lies – I know now they were lies – more frequent. My gut screamed, but my heart wanted to believe in the beautiful story we were writing. No, not us. We’re different. We’re solid.
A man wearing a black jacket and talking on the phone | Source: Midjourney
I tried to push the fear away. I cooked his favorite meals, bought him thoughtful gifts, planned little getaways. Anything to bring back that spark, that certainty. But it felt like chasing a ghost. One night, I found an old photo tucked deep inside his wallet. It wasn’t recent, but it wasn’t ancient either. A child, maybe five or six, beaming up at him. And a woman, her arm around the child, leaning into him. They looked like a family. My breath hitched. My world went from vibrant color to muted grey in an instant. This wasn’t a stranger. This wasn’t a random picture. The way he looked at them… it was love.
I waited. I had to. I waited until he came home, until he was relaxed, unsuspecting. I held the picture in my trembling hand. “Who is this?” My voice was barely a whisper, but it sounded like a scream in the quiet room. His face drained of color. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. And then, he broke.
He had a child. A daughter. And a past relationship he’d never mentioned. A whole other life, a whole other family, that existed parallel to ours. The woman in the photo was the mother. He explained, he pleaded, he cried. It was “before me,” he insisted, but he had to be there for her. For their daughter. He’d kept it a secret because he loved me so much, because he didn’t want to lose me. My perfect yesterday was a betrayal. My beautiful future, our shared “tomorrow,” shattered into a million irreparable pieces. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I ran. I just ran.
An older woman talking on the phone | Source: Midjourney
Days bled into weeks. I was numb. The pain was a living entity, consuming me from the inside out. My friends called, my family worried, but I couldn’t articulate the agony. How do you explain that the foundation of your entire existence has been ripped out from under you? I was adrift, a boat without a rudder, lost in a storm of grief and confusion. Was any of it real? Was I ever truly loved?
He kept calling, kept texting, begging for me to listen, to understand. He said there was more. More to the story. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. My heart was a crater. But a part of me, a tiny, desperate shred, needed to know. Not for him, but for me. I needed to understand how I could have been so blind. I needed to understand the scope of the lie. I needed to know who this child was, this girl who had inadvertently demolished my life.
I found her. Not through him, but through a deep, desperate dive into old social media, fragmented public records, a few hushed conversations with distant relatives who inadvertently let slip crumbs of information. I found her mother’s profile. It was private, but there was one photo visible. A child’s drawing of a family, proudly displayed. And then, a name. Not just the child’s, but the mother’s full name.
And that name… it triggered something. A faint echo from my own past. A childhood friend? No. Something deeper. A name I’d heard whispered in hushed tones by my parents years ago. A name that always felt… taboo. A name I vaguely remembered hearing in connection with a local scandal, long ago buried. My heart hammered. This couldn’t be. This was impossible.
A frowning bus driver | Source: Midjourney
I dug deeper still. Every fiber of my being screamed for me to stop, to just let the heartbreak be enough. But I couldn’t. My fingers flew across the keyboard, searching old newspaper archives, looking for anything, any connection. And then I found it. An article. An old, faded piece of newsprint, scanned and uploaded. A missing person’s report. A young woman, local, pregnant. My mother’s sister. My aunt, who I was told had moved far away, had simply vanished one day. My aunt, who my parents had rarely spoken of.
I felt a cold dread crawl up my spine. My hands shook so violently I could barely type. The pieces were starting to slot together, forming a picture so monstrous, so utterly shattering, I wished I could un-know it. The dates. The location. The missing years. The silence.
I called my mother. My voice was choked, raw with a new kind of terror. “Tell me about her,” I demanded. “Tell me about her.” I wasn’t talking about the child anymore. I was talking about the woman in the faded article. My aunt. And slowly, agonizingly, the truth unraveled.
My aunt had never moved away. She had disappeared. She had been pregnant. And then, one day, she reappeared, broken and empty, never speaking of what had happened. My parents had told everyone she was gone, moved on. A tragic, convenient lie. A family secret buried for decades.
And the child? The beautiful little girl in the photograph, the one who had inadvertently exposed my partner’s “betrayal”? The child he had been secretly seeing?
An older woman using a phone | Source: Pexels
My mother started to cry, her voice thick with generations of suppressed grief and guilt. “She… she was born that day, after your aunt left. We didn’t know what to do. Your aunt was so young. We… we put her up for adoption. Kept it quiet.” She choked on a sob. “They told us not to tell anyone. Not even your aunt, when she came back, broken. To protect her. To protect us.”
I froze. My mind raced, connecting the dots of dates, of ages, of impossible coincidences. The child’s name. The mother’s full name. The photo in his wallet. The way he looked at her. It wasn’t just a secret child of his.
THE CHILD HE WAS HIDING… SHE IS MY SISTER.
My partner wasn’t just unfaithful. He hadn’t just kept a past relationship from me. He had found my mother’s long-lost, secret child. My aunt’s child. My own half-sister, given up for adoption, a ghost in our family history. He had been trying to build a relationship with her, to somehow bring her into our lives, to right a wrong that had festered for decades. He knew. He knew all along. That’s why he couldn’t just tell me. He was caught between a secret that wasn’t his to tell, and a love he was desperately trying to hold onto.
Between yesterday and tomorrow. Yesterday, I thought I knew who I was, where I came from, who I loved. Tomorrow, I wake up to a world where my entire family history is a lie, where my partner’s “betrayal” was an attempt to mend a wound I never even knew existed. My heart isn’t just broken for a lost love; it’s shattered for a lost sister, for a stolen past, for a reality that never was. And I am utterly, irrevocably alone in this devastating truth.
