When I married Jake five years ago, I thought I knew everything about him. He was kind, calm, and stable—exactly what I needed after a messy breakup in my late 20s. We bought a small house in the suburbs, planted a vegetable garden, and adopted a lazy old lab named Winston. Life felt peaceful. Predictable.
That’s why what happened last weekend still feels like something out of a movie.
I had gone out to run errands early Saturday morning. When I got home around 10 a.m., I noticed something strange: voices coming from the backyard. One of them was definitely Jake’s. The other? It didn’t register at first. But as I stepped outside, I froze.
There was Jake… digging in the far corner of our yard. Next to him stood his ex-girlfriend, Lena.
Yes, that Lena.
The woman he dated for nearly four years before we met—the one he never really talked about, other than to say, “It ended, and I moved on.”
My stomach tightened. Why was she here? And why were they both holding shovels?
I didn’t want to make a scene, so I quietly watched from behind a tree. They were sweating and talking intensely as they dug deeper and deeper into the ground. Then, suddenly, I saw Jake pull out a small metal box.
Lena stepped forward. Her hands were trembling. She opened it slowly, and the two of them stared inside.
That’s when I stepped out.
Jake jumped, startled. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said. Lena looked away, clearly uncomfortable.
But it was exactly what it looked like: two people uncovering a secret they had buried—literally.
I demanded answers.
And Jake, pale and clearly rattled, finally gave them to me.
The Secret From Ten Years Ago
Back when Jake and Lena were together, they had planned to get married. They even bought rings and wrote letters to their future selves—letters filled with dreams, promises, and confessions. But a week before their planned elopement, Lena backed out.
Heartbroken, they decided to bury everything they had planned for their future together. A symbolic goodbye to what could’ve been. They chose a quiet spot in Jake’s parents’ backyard—the very same yard we now owned after his parents sold us the house.
He had forgotten about it—until Lena called him last week, saying she’d been having strange dreams and wanted closure.
Instead of telling me, he agreed to meet her and dig it up, hoping to get it over with quickly.
But what they found wasn’t just rings and letters. It was a positive pregnancy test—one Lena had taken a few days before the breakup but never told Jake about.
The child, she revealed, was never born—she had miscarried early and never had the courage to tell him.
That revelation hit Jake hard. And me? I didn’t know what to feel.
Betrayed? Hurt? Or just sad that a decade-old secret could still shake the very foundation of our marriage?
Now, Everything Feels Different
Jake has been quiet ever since. We’ve barely spoken. I’m not mad at him for his past—but for keeping me in the dark about something so raw and emotional.
Lena has disappeared again, probably for good this time.
But that box they pulled from the ground? It did more than uncover the past.
It exposed a crack in our present.
And now I have to decide: Do I fill that hole back up and move on?
Or do I keep digging for the truth Jake might still be hiding?
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental. The image accompanying this article is AI-generated.