Grief makes you do strange things. A week after burying my husband, I found myself scrolling through his inbox, desperate for any connection to the man I had lost. That’s when I saw it—an email confirming his subscription to a location-tracking service.
My blood ran cold.
We had shared everything—or so I thought. Why would he need to track someone’s location in secret?
With trembling fingers, I logged into the service using his old password. The screen loaded, and there it was: a live map with a blinking dot. His phone—or at least, the phone registered under his name—was active. And it was moving, just a few neighborhoods away.
I barely had time to process what that meant before a chat notification popped up. A woman’s photo appeared, followed by a message: “Are you still there? What’s the plan?”
Then, a reply came through—from his account. A selfie loaded.
But it wasn’t him.
The face on the screen was a stranger’s.
My stomach dropped. Someone had hacked his account. Someone was pretending to be him. And suddenly, the man I had loved and mourned felt like a mystery all over again.
Was this why he had been so secretive in those last few months? Had he been involved in something dangerous? Or was this just a cruel twist of fate—a final betrayal from the universe?
I’ll never know the full truth. But in that moment, I realized something chilling: even in death, the people we love can still surprise us.
