My husband disappeared when my son was 5 months old. When my son started talking, he always said that a bad man came to his room while we were sleeping. We didn’t take it seriously.

Years later, I found my husband’s old watch in my son’s room, hidden behind a closet. I panicked because my husband was wearing that watch the day he disappeared. When I asked my son about it, he said he didn’t know how the watch got there and swore he had never seen it before.

My husband had struggled with deep depression for many years. It’s been almost 20 years now, and we’ve never seen him again. But I still get chills every time I think about that watch.

The weight of those memories hangs heavy on me. My son, now a teenager, has grown up without the father he deserves, and I’ve spent years piecing together fragments of our lives before the disappearance. The watch, with its scratched surface and faded hands, serves as a haunting reminder of what was lost.

When my son first spoke of the “bad man,” I dismissed it as childhood imagination—a shadowy figure that lurked in the corners of his mind. Yet, as he continued to mention the man over the years, the unease settled deeper within me. Was it just a figment of his imagination, or something more sinister? I often wondered if our lives were tangled in a narrative I couldn’t see.

Finding the watch felt like discovering a hidden chapter of a story I thought I knew. How could it have ended up in my son’s room, hidden away? It gnawed at me—what if he had seen something he didn’t understand? When I asked him about it, his wide eyes held a mix of confusion and innocence. “I don’t know, Mom,” he said earnestly, his voice steady. “I’ve never seen it before.”

The silence that followed was deafening. I could see his mind racing, trying to comprehend my panic. My heart ached for both of us. I wanted to protect him from whatever darkness haunted the past, but I also felt the urgency to uncover the truth.

As the years went by, the watch remained tucked away in a drawer, its presence a constant reminder of the unknown. I often wondered if I should tell my son more about his father’s struggles, about the demons that drove him away. But how could I explain something so complex? The risk of opening old wounds weighed heavily on me.

Now, as I look at my son, I see glimpses of his father in him—his laughter, his kindness, even his melancholy. It’s a bittersweet reminder of what could have been. I want to believe that my husband found peace somewhere, but the mystery of his disappearance continues to linger, like an unanswered question echoing through the years.

Each night, I tuck my son in, reminding him that he is loved, that he is safe. But sometimes, I catch him staring into the shadows, as if sensing something just beyond reach. And I wonder if he, too, feels the weight of the watch’s legacy—a legacy of a father lost, a story left unfinished.