When Angela stumbles upon her late husband’s wristwatch inside her second husband Bryan’s nightstand drawer, her world shatters. She confronts Bryan, but his answers reveal a devastating truth that tears her life apart.
I don’t know how to begin, but maybe it’s best if I just tell it as it happened. There are days that start out ordinary, and then, in the blink of an eye, everything changes. This was one of those days.
A thoughtful woman | Source: Midjourney
I was tidying up the house, keeping busy, keeping my mind from wandering too much into the past. Bryan’s side of the bed was its usual mess, with socks kicked off hurriedly and his nightstand drawer slightly open.
I wasn’t snooping, I swear, but something about that open drawer caught my eye. Maybe it was just instinct, or maybe it was fate pushing me toward the truth.
When I opened it fully, I didn’t expect to find anything out of the ordinary. But then I saw it.
An open drawer | Source: Pexels
A wristwatch. And not just any wristwatch. It had belonged to my late husband Jeff. The one I gave him on our first anniversary, with the words “Forever Yours, A.” engraved on the back. My heart stopped and literally skipped a beat as I picked it up with trembling hands.
I knew that watch like I knew my heartbeat. But it shouldn’t be here. Bryan didn’t even know Jeff. I only met him six months after Jeff died. I felt a cold wave of confusion wash over me.
How could Bryan have this? It didn’t make sense. Nothing about this made sense.
A shocked woman | Source: Midjourney
I dropped the watch, my hands shaking too much to hold onto it. It fell to the carpet with a soft thud, but the noise echoed in my head like a bomb going off.
When Bryan came home that evening, I didn’t even let him take off his coat before I confronted him. My voice was tight, barely controlled, as I held up the watch in front of him.
“Where did you get this?”
The look on his face told me everything and nothing at the same time.
A man with an unreadable expression | Source: Midjourney
He went pale, eyes wide like he’d seen a ghost. He just stared at the watch, his mouth opening and closing like he couldn’t find the words. The silence stretched between us, thick and heavy, until I thought I might scream just to break it.
Finally, Bryan spoke, but his voice was so soft that I had to strain to hear him. “I… I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
“Find out what?” I snapped, my frustration bubbling over.
An angry woman | Source: Midjourney
He looked away, running a hand through his hair, his whole body tense like he was bracing for impact. “Angela, there’s something I need to tell you. Something I should have told you from the beginning, but I didn’t know how.”
I felt a chill run down my spine. “What are you talking about?”
“Jeff was… Jeff was my brother.”
I stared at him, my mind rejecting the words. It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach, and I couldn’t breathe.
A woman gasping in shock | Source: Midjourney
“Your brother? But Jeff never said he had a brother… and you never said anything either. We’ve been married three years! How could you—”
“I didn’t just not say anything, Angela. I hid it. Years ago, I changed my name, left the country, and cut all ties with my past. I was bitter, angry, and I couldn’t stand being around my family anymore. Jeff and I had a falling out. A big one. And I thought the only way to move on was to leave it all behind, including him.”
Bryan’s voice cracked, and he looked at me with such sorrow in his eyes that it made my heart ache.
A sad man | Source: Midjourney
“I didn’t know Jeff was gone until months later. By the time I came back, it was too late. He was already dead. I went to his grave, and that’s when I saw you.”
I could feel tears prickling at the corners of my eyes, but I blinked them back, refusing to let them fall. “You saw me there? At Jeff’s grave?”
Bryan nodded, his hands shaking. “Yes. I didn’t know who you were at first, but when I found out, I… I don’t know, Angela. I was drawn to you.”
A thoughtful man | Source: Midjourney
“Maybe it was guilt, or maybe it was something else, but I couldn’t stay away. And then… then we fell in love.”
I felt like the room was spinning. This man, the one I had trusted, had kept this from me? This wasn’t just some mistake; this was my entire life, everything I thought I knew, turned upside down.
“But the watch,” I managed to say, my voice shaking as much as my hands. “How did you get Jeff’s watch?”
A woman speaking to her husband | Source: Midjourney
“After I came back, I found my mother at Jeff’s grave. She forgave me, even though I didn’t deserve it. And she gave me this,” he gestured to the watch, his voice heavy with regret. “It was the only thing she had left of Jeff. A way to make peace, she said. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid you’d hate me.”
I stood there, staring at the man I thought I knew, and I couldn’t make sense of anything anymore.
Close up of a woman’s face | Source: Midjourney
His words kept circling in my head, wrapping tighter around my heart, choking the life out of me. Jeff’s brother. How had I missed it? How could I have been so blind?
“Angela, please,” he started, taking a step closer. But I held up my hand to stop him, needing distance, needing to breathe. I couldn’t look at him without seeing all the lies, all the secrets that had been hiding in plain sight.
“I… I can’t do this,” I said, my voice sounding foreign, hollow.
A woman standing in a kitchen | Source: Midjourney
The room felt like it was closing in on me, the walls pushing in until there was no space left to think, to feel anything but the overwhelming weight of betrayal.
“Angela, listen to me,” Bryan pleaded, his voice breaking. “I know I should have told you from the beginning, but I didn’t want to lose you.”
“But you already have,” I whispered, barely able to say the words out loud. They hurt too much, like shards of glass scraping against my throat.
A heartbroken woman | Source: Midjourney
“You lost me the moment you decided to hide this from me. You let me fall in love with a lie.”
He shook his head, desperation in his eyes. “No, it wasn’t a lie. My love for you is real. Everything we’ve built together, it’s real. I swear to you, Angela, I never meant to deceive you.”
“Maybe not,” I said, my voice trembling as I fought to keep it together. “But you did. You deceived me every day you looked me in the eye and didn’t tell me the truth. I trusted you, Bryan. I trusted you with everything I had left after Jeff, and now… now I don’t even know who you are.”
A woman pointing her finger | Source: Midjourney
The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating. Bryan’s shoulders slumped, his face a mask of sorrow and regret. I could see the pain in his eyes, but it didn’t change the fact that I felt like I’d been living in someone else’s story, a story I didn’t sign up for.
I turned away from him, the tears I’d been holding back finally spilling over.
“I need to pack,” I muttered, more to myself than to him. I needed to move, to do something, anything, to keep from falling apart completely.
A woman in a darkened hallway | Source: Midjourney
“Please, Angela, don’t go,” Bryan begged, but his voice sounded distant. It was as if it was coming from the other end of a tunnel. “We can work through this. We can—”
“There’s nothing to work through,” I interrupted, choking on my own words. “I can’t stay in this marriage, Bryan. Not after this. I can’t stay with someone I don’t even recognize anymore.”
I walked to the bedroom, each step feeling heavier than the last. My hands shook as I pulled out a suitcase, the sound of the zipper echoing in the room.
A woman packing a suitcase | Source: Pexels
Bryan stood in the doorway, his face pale, watching me pack with a helplessness that almost broke me. Almost. But the anger and betrayal were stronger, driving me forward and pushing me to leave behind everything we had built.
“Angela, please,” he said one last time, his voice so soft, so broken, it was almost a whisper.
But I couldn’t stop. If I stopped, I’d crumble, and I couldn’t afford that. Not now. Not ever.
A woman hanging her head | Source: Midjourney
I zipped up the suitcase and lifted it from the bed. My heart pounded as I walked past him without a word. As I reached the front door, I hesitated, just for a moment.
Part of me wanted to turn back, to give him one last look, but I couldn’t. I knew if I did, I might lose the strength I’d gathered to walk away.
So I stepped out the door, the cool evening air hitting my face like a slap. I didn’t look back as I walked to my car and climbed in, each step feeling like I was tearing my heart out.
A woman in a car | Source: Midjourney
But I kept going because there was no other choice. The man I loved, the man I thought I knew, was a stranger. And I couldn’t live with that. Not anymore.
These bugs come out at nighttime, and attacking victims, they silently kill or leave them with a lifelong infection
When Emiliana Rodriguez was a little girl, she recalls watching friends play a nighttime soccer match when one of the players abruptly died on the pitch.
Unaware of what had transpired, Rodriguez, a native of Bolivia, developed a phobia of the dark and the “monster”—the silent killer known as Chagas—that she had been told only appears at night.
Chagas disease is a unique sort of illness that is spread by nocturnal insects. It is also known as the “silent and silenced disease” that infects up to 8 million people annually, killing 12,000 people on average.
Emiliana Rodriguez, 42, discovered she had to live with Chagas, a “monster,” after relocating to Barcelona from Bolivia 27 years ago.
“Night is when the fear generally struck. I didn’t always sleep well,” she admitted. “I was worried that I wouldn’t wake up from my sleep.”
Rodriguez had specific tests when she was eight years old and expecting her first child, and the results indicated that she carried the Chagas gene. She recalled the passing of her buddy and remarked, “I was paralyzed with shock and remembered all those stories my relatives told me about people suddenly dying.” “I wondered, ‘What will happen to my baby?’”
Rodriguez was prescribed medicine, though, to prevent the parasite from vertically transmitting to her unborn child. After her daughter was born, she tested negative. Elvira Idalia Hernández Cuevas, 18, was unaware of the Mexican silent killer until her 18-year-old son was diagnosed with Chagas.
Idalia, an eighteen-year-old blood donor from her birthplace near Veracruz, Mexico, had a positive diagnosis for Chagas, a disease caused by triatomine bugs, often known as vampire or kissing bugs and bloodsucking parasites, when her sample was tested.
In an interview with the Guardian, Hernandez stated, “I started to research Chagas on the internet because I had never heard of it.” When I read that it was a silent murderer, I became really afraid. I had no idea where to go or what to do.
She is not alone in this; a lot of people are ignorant of the diseases that these unpleasant bugs can spread. The term Chagas originates from Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas, a Brazilian physician and researcher who made the discovery of the human case in 1909.
Over the past few decades, reports of the incidence of Chagas disease have been made in Europe, Japan, Australia, Latin America, and North America.
Kissing bugs are mostly found in rural or suburban low-income housing walls, where they are most active at night when humans are asleep. The insect bites an animal or person, then excretes on the skin of the victim. The victim may inadvertently scratch the area and sever the skin, or they may spread the excrement into their mouth or eyes. This is how the T. cruzi infection is disseminated.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between 6 and 7 million people worldwide—roughly 8 million people in Mexico, Central America, and South America—have Chagas disease; the majority of these individuals remain oblivious to their illness. These estimates are provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The persistent infection might be fatal if untreated. According to the Guardian, Chagas disease kills over 12,000 people year, “more people in Latin America than any other parasite disease, including malaria.”
Despite the fact that these bugs have been found in the United States—nearly 300,000 people are infected—they are not thought to be endemic.
While some people never experience any symptoms, the CDC notes that 20 to 30 percent experience gastrointestinal or heart problems that can cause excruciating pain decades later.
Furthermore, only 10% of cases are detected globally, which makes prevention and treatment exceedingly challenging.
Hernández and her daughter Idalia went to see a number of doctors in search of assistance, but all were also uninformed about Chagas disease and its management. “I was taken aback, terrified, and depressed because I believed my kid was going to pass away. Above all, Hernandez stated, “I was more anxious because I was unable to locate any trustworthy information.”
Idalia finally got the care she required after receiving assistance from a family member who was employed in the medical field.
“The Mexican government claims that the Chagas disease is under control and that not many people are affected, but that is untrue,” Hernández asserts. Medical practitioners misdiagnose Chagas disease for other heart conditions because they lack knowledge in this area. Most people are unaware that there is Chagas in Mexico.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified chagas as a neglected tropical disease, which means that the global health policy agenda does not include it.
Chagas is overlooked in part because, according to Colin Forsyth, a research manager at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), “it’s a silent disease that stays hidden for so long in your body… because of the asymptomatic nature of the initial part of the infection.”
Forsyth went on to say, “The people affected just don’t have the power to influence healthcare policy,” making reference to the impoverished communities. It’s kept hidden by a convergence of social and biological factors.
Chagas, however, is becoming more well recognized as it spreads to other continents and can also be transferred from mother to child during pregnancy or childbirth, as well as through organ and blood transfusions.
The main objective of the Chagas Hub, a UK-based facility founded by Professor David Moore, a doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, is to get “more people tested and treated, and to manage the risk of transmission, which in the UK is from mother to child,” according to Professor Moore.
Regarding the WHO’s 2030 aim for the eradication of the disease, Moore stated that progress toward it is “glacial” and added, “I can’t imagine that we’ll be remotely close by 2030.” That seems improbable.
Two medications that have been available for more than 50 years to treat chagas are benznidazole and nifurtimox, which according to Moore are “toxic, unpleasant, not particularly effective.”
Although the medications are effective in curing babies, there is no guarantee that they will prevent or halt the advancement of the condition in adults.
Regarding severe adverse effects, Rodriguez remembers getting dizziness and nausea as well as breaking out in hives. She completed her therapy, and she gets checked out annually.
Moore goes on to say that while creating stronger anti-Chaga drugs is crucial to stopping the disease’s spread, pharmaceutical companies are currently not financially motivated to do so.
As president of the International Federation of Associations of People Affected by Chagas condition (FINDECHAGAS), Hernández is on a mission to raise awareness of the condition until there is a greater need on the market for innovative treatments.
In Spain, Rodriguez is battling the “monster” as part of a campaign to increase public awareness of Chagas disease being conducted by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.
“I’m tired of hearing nothing at all,” Rodriguez declares. “I want Chagas to be discussed and made public. I’m in favor of testing and therapy for individuals.
They are being heard, too.
World Chagas Disease Day was instituted by the WHO on April 14, 1909, the day Carlos discovered the disease’s first human case.The WHO states that “a diversified set of 20 diseases and disease categories are set out to be prevented, controlled, eliminated, and eradicated through global targets for 2030 and milestones.” And among them is Chagas.
To prevent a possible infestation, the CDC suggests taking the following steps:
Close up any gaps and fissures around doors, windows, walls, and roofs.
Clear out the rock, wood, and brush piles close to your home.
Put screens on windows and doors, and fix any tears or holes in them.
Close up gaps and crevices that lead to the exterior, crawl areas beneath the home, and the attic.
Keep pets inside, especially during the evening.
Maintain the cleanliness of your home and any outdoor pet resting places, and check for bugs on a regular basis.
If you believe you have discovered a kissing insect, the CDC recommends avoiding crushing it. Alternatively, carefully put the bug in a jar, fill it with rubbing alcohol, and then freeze it. It is then recommended that you bring the bug’s container to an academic lab or your local health authority so that it can be identified.
Please tell this tale to help spread the word about an illness that goes unnoticed!
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