My Mute Wife Only Spoke To Her Ex

For three years, since the day our son was born, my wife has suffered from unexplained mutism, a silence the doctors blamed on a severe psychological block. For three years, Jocelyn hadn’t spoken a single word to me.

She’d stand by, silent, even if the carbon monoxide alarm was screaming.

She never soothed our baby when he cried or fed him when he was hungry.

When my small construction business went under, I didn’t have a second to mourn. I started driving for every delivery app—DoorDash, Uber Eats, you name it—just to pay the bills, all while still dragging Jocelyn to endless therapy appointments and specialists.

That day, after working a grueling fourteen hours, exhaustion had turned my brain to mush. I was backing the van into our driveway and didn’t see her. I didn’t see that she’d let our three-year-old, Leo, play right behind the tires.

The crunch beneath my back tire was sickeningly familiar, yet utterly foreign. A sharp, brief cry, then nothing.

My legs gave out. I forced myself to move, my hands shaking so violently I could barely scoop up Leo and rush him to the car.

Jocelyn just stood there. Silent, impassive, like she always did. She looked at the scene—at her own child—as if it were a scene playing out on TV, nothing to do with her.

I finally snapped. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her hard, the years of silent suffering bubbling into a primal scream.

“You saw him! Why couldn’t you shout? Why did you put him there? What twisted psychological problem makes you watch your own son die? Are you trying to kill me too?”

I was hysterical, veins popping in my neck. But Jocelyn wouldn’t—couldn’t—open her mouth. The three years of dead silence had finally broken me. I was ready to collapse, to surrender to the despair.

That’s when it happened. She pushed through the small crowd that had gathered, and for the first time in 1,095 days, she spoke. It was soft, barely a whisper, but the sound slammed into me like a physical blow.

“Marcus…”

Marcus Wells. Her first love. The man she never stopped calling her ‘forever ex.’

Her psychological block wasn’t a disorder. It was us.

1

I slumped against the waiting room wall at the ER, my hands clasped so tight my knuckles were white. A man like me shouldn’t beg, but I was begging. I was praying to a God I hadn’t spoken to since I was a kid.

Please, let him live. Just let him live.

Jocelyn? I didn’t want her anymore.

Leo was so small, he could barely string a sentence together. I hadn’t taken him anywhere. I hadn’t shown him the ocean or the mountains.

I hit myself, hard, across the face several times. Why was I so tired? Why was I so careless? Why didn’t I check the rearview camera one last time?

The work fatigue had been instantly replaced by the raw, suffocating terror of a father.

Why was fate so cruel as to make me the one to kill my own child?

The emergency room light blinked off. The doctor, his scrubs soaked with blood, walked out.

“He has multiple fractures. A rib pierced his heart. We stabilized him, but he needs to go to the ICU immediately. Prepare yourselves, family.”

I hit the floor. The back of my head slammed against the concrete wall, and the world went dark.

When I woke up, Jocelyn was standing over me, her face lined with a familiar, manufactured concern. She poured me a cup of weak hospital coffee. Still silent.

I was too tired to press her. Too exhausted to chase the truth.

It didn’t matter anymore.

We used to dream about the day her voice came back, how happy we would be, a perfect family of three. But now I knew the truth. She wasn’t unable to speak to us; she was simply unwilling.

A dead calm settled inside me. I spoke into the silence.

“Jocelyn, we’re done. We are getting a divorce. Three years ago, you said you were a burden, and you were right. I hate you for it.”

She recoiled as if I’d struck her. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She shook her head desperately.

She typed quickly on her phone and showed me the screen.

‘I am devastated about Leo. We need to get through this together.’

Talking about Leo made my eyes burn again.

How could I believe her? How could I convince myself that I had hallucinated that single, clear word?

When my son’s life was hanging by a thread, she abandoned us. She broke her vow of silence for the man she never let go of. Her forever ex.

I didn’t want to talk anymore. I just walked to the glass divider to look at my son.

This was all my fault.

Just give Daddy one chance, kid. I’m taking you away from here. We don’t need her.

I swallowed the tears, forced myself into a functional state.

ICU costs were crippling. I had to go back to work.

That same morning, I called a realtor and listed our house.

I was peddling snacks and drinks out of my delivery van later that week when a buyer called me.

He was viewing the house and commented on how immaculate I kept the place, impressed by my work ethic.

Then he saw a photograph of Jocelyn. His demeanor changed.

“Oh, you’re a friend of Mrs. Reid? That makes this easy. Mrs. Reid is a generous woman, a true partner. Any man lucky enough to marry her gets a built-in venture capitalist. She backed her husband’s company with everything she had.”

My smile froze solid. I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

He chuckled, explaining.

“Mr. Wells’ business is booming. He’s our biggest vendor now. I need him for my contract, so this house? Just name your price. I’ll make sure it closes.”

Marcus Wells?

My hands, calloused and scraped from loading up my beat-up delivery van, felt like a pathetic joke.

From the conversation, I learned the horrifying truth: Jocelyn had funneled my money—our money—into Marcus’s company, becoming his silent, major shareholder, while watching my business fail and our family sink into penury.

A searing pain bloomed in my chest.

I excused myself to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, trying to regain control.