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The 3:00 AM Habit<\/p>\n
I woke up in the middle of the night \u2014 my husband was not in bed. The clock said 3:12 am I checked the kitchen \u2014 empty. Then the front door opened, and he walked in. “Where were you?” I asked. “TAKING OUT THE TRASH.” “AT 3 AM?” I was stunned. “Yes,” he said.<\/p>\n
It was obvious he was lying. I looked under the sink. The trash was gone. I had nothing. The next night, I pretended to sleep trying to catch him but dozed off. Morning came \u2014 trash was gone again.<\/p>\n
So, the night after that, I set an alarm for 3:00 am I woke up \u2014 his side of the bed was cold. I stepped outside and froze when I saw him.<\/p>\n
He wasn’t at the curb. He was at the edge of the woods behind our house, illuminated by the neighbor’s floodlight. He was not carrying our kitchen bag; he was dragging a heavy, industrial-sized black liner from the trunk of his car.<\/p>\n
I watched, paralyzed, as he heaved the bag into a deep trench I hadn’t noticed before. He stopped, wiped his brow, and looked directly toward the bedroom window. I ducked, my heart hammering against my ribs.<\/p>\n
The next morning, I waited until he left for work. I grabbed a shovel and ran to the spot in the woods. I expected something grizzly \u2014 something from a nightmare. But as I unearthed the bag and tore it open, I found only old clothes, broken trinkets, and framed photos.<\/p>\n
They weren’t mine. They were his. Everything from his life before we met was being discarded, piece by piece, every single night.<\/p>\n
I heard a twig snap behind me.<\/p>\n
“I told you, honey,” his voice whispered right in my ear. “I was just taking out the trash. I wanted to be a brand-new man for you.”<\/p>\n
He held out his hand, his eyes void of any emotion. “Now, what are we going to do about the mess you just made?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The 3:00 AM Habit I woke up in the middle of the night \u2014 my husband was not in bed. The clock said 3:12 am I checked the kitchen \u2014 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3658,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656\/revisions\/3658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}