I thought coming home early would be romantic.
Instead, it felt like stepping into someone else’s life.
I hadn’t slept properly in days. The Chicago business conference had been an endless parade of PowerPoints and bad hotel coffee. Three years into marriage, Nathan and I felt more like colleagues than partners—me hopping between tech clients, him drowning in his investment firm. We hadn’t shared a proper dinner in over a month.
So when my last meeting ended early, I didn’t think twice.
“Skipping the VP’s keynote?” my colleague Jenna teased as I packed up.
“For once,” I smiled. “I’m catching the 6:15 to Denver. Going to surprise Nathan.”
She smirked. “Careful—surprises sometimes reveal things you don’t want to know.”
Her words stuck with me longer than I’d like to admit.
By the time I reached our driveway, the Rockies glowed amber in the sunset. The porch light blinked on automatically, but something about the stillness felt… staged.
Inside, the house was wrong. Mail scattered across the table—three envelopes stamped URGENT. A coffee cup abandoned on the counter, a ring of dried liquid around the lip. Nathan was meticulous. This chaos didn’t fit.
Then I noticed the faint scent of fresh soil drifting through the open back door.
I stepped outside.
There he was—shirt sleeves rolled, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat—digging furiously in the middle of our vegetable garden. And next to him, half-buried, was something I couldn’t process at first.
A massive, glossy black egg. At least two feet tall. The surface shimmered under the porch light, almost like glass.
Nathan muttered to himself, shoveling faster. “Just a bit deeper…”
“Nathan?”
He jumped like I’d fired a gun. The shovel hit something metallic with a sharp clang.
“Rachel? What—what are you doing here?”
“I came home early. What is that?”
“It’s nothing,” he said too quickly. “Go inside.”
“Nothing? You’re burying a giant black egg in our garden like we’re in some bad sci-fi flick.”
“I’ll explain later.”
“No. Now.”
He raked a hand through his hair, eyes darting toward the street. “Please, just trust me. I’m handling it.”
“Handling what?” I pressed. “Because it looks like you’re hiding something.”
When he barked “I SAID I’M HANDLING IT,” the night went still. Neither of us moved. I turned and walked inside without another word.
I didn’t sleep. Around 3 a.m., I heard the back door click. From the window, I watched him pacing the garden, checking the burial spot like a guard on patrol.
The next morning, once he left for work, I grabbed a shovel. My pulse thundered as I dug through the soft, fresh earth.
Twenty minutes later, my spade hit something solid. The egg.
Up close, it wasn’t organic at all. Smooth, synthetic—plastic. I twisted it gently, and it split open along a hidden seam. Empty.
“Rachel?”
I nearly dropped it. Mr. Yamato, our elderly neighbor, was peering over the fence.
“I saw someone in your garden last night,” he said.
“Just… gardening,” I lied, hiding the egg behind my leg.
I stashed it in the garage under a tarp, but the questions kept clawing at me. Why bury it? Who was he hiding it from?
Driving to work, I got my answer.
The radio crackled with breaking news:
“Police have exposed a massive fraud ring selling fake artifacts to high-end collectors. Key items include black, egg-shaped containers passed off as ancient fertility relics…”
My hands went cold.
That night, I placed the egg on the kitchen table like a trap and waited.
Nathan walked in, froze, and dropped his briefcase. “Rachel, I—”
“How much?”
“Fifteen thousand,” he admitted, sinking into a chair.
“You spent fifteen thousand on a plastic egg?”
He ran both hands over his face. “I thought it was real. A guy at work introduced me to a dealer—said it was from the Tang dynasty, worth triple in a year. I wanted to flip it and take you on that Europe trip we keep talking about.”
“You mean the trip we’ve been saving for? You used that money?”
His voice broke. “Your mom’s medical bills. The HVAC. I thought if I made this one big win, I could fix everything.”
Part of me was furious. Another part saw the wreckage of a well-meaning but spectacularly bad decision.
“And burying it was…?” I asked.
“I panicked when the news broke. If you didn’t find it, I thought I could spare you the disappointment.”
“You idiot,” I said softly. “I don’t care about eggs or trips. I care about you. But you can’t keep shutting me out when things go wrong.”
He nodded. “I filed a police report today. They think they can recover some of the money.”
I exhaled. “Well… at least it’s a story we’ll never live down.”
Nathan laughed weakly. “The time I tried to save our marriage with a fake egg.”
I smiled. “We should actually bury it—make it a monument to terrible decisions.”
“Or a reminder,” he said, squeezing my hand, “that trust is worth more than any treasure.”
