I didn’t say a word. I quietly walked away. Hours later, he identified a body wearing my blue dress, but the shoes weren’t mine…
PART 1
“Your wife died this morning. We need you to come identify the body.”
That was the message my husband, Grant Whitaker, heard on our answering machine, still wearing a towel around his waist. I know because I heard the same recording myself, standing frozen in my own front hall with my suitcase at my feet.
I had come home early. The training course in Chicago had ended ahead of schedule, and I wasn’t supposed to be back in Columbus for three more days. I let myself in quietly, and I heard the shower running upstairs. I heard the message. I heard my own name.
Later, from what Grant told the police and what the medical examiner’s staff told me, I pieced together the rest of that day.
He had stepped out of the shower barely ten minutes earlier. He was waiting for Tessa, his 25-year-old mistress, so they could spend the afternoon together in the same bedroom where he slept with me.
The first thing he felt wasn’t sadness.
It was anger.
“Damn it, Naomi! Why did you have to come back early?”
He called the child development center I ran. My secretary, who didn’t know any better, confirmed it: “Mrs. Whitaker took a flight this morning, sir. The course ended earlier than planned.”
Grant hung up slowly. He remembered that, coming out of the bathroom, he had caught my perfume in the hallway. A scent he would have recognized among hundreds.
Still, he decided it had been his imagination.
He dressed quickly and headed for the County Medical Examiner’s Office, forgetting Tessa completely.
A doctor received him with a serious expression. “There was an accident on the highway. A freight truck struck a woman. The driver was intoxicated. Among her belongings we found clothing with your wife’s name.”
On a table lay a blue dress, a pair of earrings, and a gold chain with a small heart. My dress. We had bought it together. My chain. Grant himself had given it to me for our anniversary.
But then he noticed a pair of black high-heeled shoes.
“Those shoes aren’t my wife’s,” he murmured.
“She could have bought them recently,” the doctor replied. “The identification is still preliminary.”
When they lifted the sheet, his legs trembled. The woman’s face was unrecognizable. She had short, dark hair, exactly like mine.
“Is it her?”
Grant looked away. “Yes… it must be her. The clothes and jewelry are hers.”
The doctor wrote down his words but explained that further verification was needed. “We also need to speak with her mother. We’ve already asked her to come in tomorrow.”
Grant went home completely confused. He didn’t know that night would be the last time he slept peacefully.
For two years of marriage he had controlled my life. He checked my schedule, criticized my friends, and even decided when I could visit my mother.
With Tessa it was different. She worked as an administrative assistant at his building materials company and was willing to endure any humiliation just to become Mrs. Whitaker.
“Will you ever marry me?” she had asked him one afternoon.
Grant burst out laughing. “You’ll never measure up to Naomi. She’s a real woman. You’re just my entertainment.”
Tessa cried. Still, she kept coming back.
What Grant didn’t know was that, during her last visit, Tessa had gone into my walk-in closet carrying a gym bag, and had walked out with something that didn’t belong to her.
The next morning, the doctor called him aside.
“Mr. Whitaker, the autopsy revealed something you need to know. The woman was pregnant.”
“Impossible! My wife has a heart condition and takes birth control. I take care of that myself!”
“Then there’s something even stranger: this woman showed no sign of any heart disease.”
Grant felt a chill. Then he remembered a tiny detail he had never seen on my body, and he asked in a cracking voice:
“Doctor… did that woman have a tattoo of a bee on a flower, right above the ankle?”
The answer was about to destroy everything Grant believed he knew.
PART 2
“Yes,” the doctor answered. “A yellow bee on a red flower. Why do you ask?”
Grant stumbled backward until he hit a chair.
“Because that tattoo isn’t Naomi’s. It’s Tessa’s! That woman is my mistress!”
The doctor closed the file. “Then we have a serious problem, Mr. Whitaker. You identified the wrong body. We’ll have to notify the District Attorney’s office and confirm her identity through the proper procedures.”
Grant barely heard him. He remembered the black shoes, the gym bag, Tessa’s strange interest in photographs of me. And a conversation from the week before.
“If I dressed like Naomi, would you look at me differently?” Tessa had asked.
He had laughed. Now he understood it hadn’t been a joke. Tessa had taken my dress and jewelry. She had even cut and dyed her hair to look like mine. She had died dressed as the woman she so badly wanted to replace.
But what disturbed him most was the pregnancy. For months he had forced me to take birth control, insisting he would never be a father. Meanwhile, his mistress had been carrying his child.
