[STORY] My Wife Skipped My Mom’s Funeral for “Work”—But I Saw Her Traveling With Her Lover

My Wife Skipped My Mom’s Funeral for “Work”—But I Saw Her Traveling With Her Lover

Chapter One: “I’m So Sorry I Couldn’t Be There”

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there. That meeting nearly killed me.”

“How are you holding up? How was Chicago?”

“Exhausting. The client almost walked. I had to stay an extra night just to hold it together.”

“I’m glad it worked out.”

She walked in confident. She had a story ready. She had practiced the tiredness in her voice, and she had no reason to think any of it wasn’t working. When I asked about Chicago, she answered without hesitating — names, details, the kind of specifics people reach for when they want to sound like they were really there. She had gotten good at this. Maybe she had always been good at it, and I just hadn’t had a reason to notice before.

What she didn’t know was what I had seen four hours earlier, on the way back from burying my mother. And I had it on video.

My mother used to say that the truest thing about a person is what they do when they think no one is watching. I’ve thought about that a lot in the years since she died. I’ve thought about what Danielle did when she thought I wasn’t watching. And I’ve thought about what I did in the weeks that followed, when I realized I had seen more than I was supposed to see. I don’t know if my mother would have approved of all of it, but I think she would have understood.

Chapter Two: Evelyn

Evelyn Mercer was sixty-eight years old when she got sick, and she was the kind of woman who made other people feel like the most important person in the room without seeming to try. Danielle had loved her early in our marriage in a way that I believed was genuine, because the things my wife did for my mother in those first years were not the things you do for an audience.

She drove my mother to appointments when I couldn’t. She sat with her through the early medical conversations, when the language of illness was still new and frightening and required someone patient to translate it into something manageable. She called her Mom, and my mother called her the daughter she’d been waiting for. And for a while, that was simply true.

The change was gradual enough that I kept finding reasons to explain it away. Danielle had a demanding job, regional director at a medical device company, which meant her schedule belonged to sales cycles and client relationships that operated on their own logic. I told myself that as my mother’s illness progressed and my role as her primary caregiver expanded, it was natural that Danielle would feel the weight of what was shifting in our household. I was less present. I was tired. I was managing things that had no clean resolution. I accepted her increasing distance as a reasonable response to an unreasonable set of circumstances.

I was wrong about that, but I didn’t know it yet.

Chapter Three: What Caregiving Teaches You

The two years of my mother’s illness were the years I learned what I was actually capable of. Not in any way I would have chosen, but in the way that caregiving teaches you things about endurance and patience and the specific loneliness of being the person who holds everything together.

I arranged the medications and the insurance appeals and the doctors who didn’t return calls and the nights she couldn’t sleep and the mornings that started at five because that was when the discomfort was worst. I did most of it without complaint and without particularly wanting credit, because it was my mother, and there was no version of the situation in which I didn’t do it. What I wanted, what I thought I had, was a partner who understood that this season was hard without needing me to explain it every time.

Instead, about eight months before my mother died, something shifted in Danielle in a way that I could feel but couldn’t name. She became careful with her phone in a way she hadn’t been before. Not dramatically secretive, just careful, in the way people get careful when a device has started carrying things they’d rather keep contained. She had more trips, more late returns, more of the particular energy she got when she was working toward something that mattered to her.

I told myself that was good. I told myself she was finding momentum in her career, and that was healthy. She had always been the kind of person who moved toward achievement the way other people moved toward warmth, and I had always admired that in her. I didn’t understand until later that what she was moving toward wasn’t a promotion.

Chapter Four: The ICU

Three months before my mother died, Evelyn went into the ICU after a complications episode that came on quickly and escalated faster than any of us were prepared for. I was at the hospital within an hour. I called Danielle from the waiting room, my voice doing the thing it does when I’m trying to sound steadier than I am.

She said she was with a client and couldn’t leave. She said she was sorry. She said she would be there as soon as she could.

I sat outside the ICU for six hours, and then overnight, alone, drinking bad coffee from a machine in the hallway and telling myself that some situations just required a person to show up alone, and that was all right. I didn’t know until much later what Danielle had actually been doing that night. I’ll get there.

My mother stabilized and came home, and we had two more months with her. They were the quiet kind of months that happen when a person has accepted what is coming and has decided to spend whatever time remains being exactly herself. She asked about Danielle sometimes — not in a pointed way, she wasn’t that kind of woman, but with the genuine curiosity of someone who had loved a person and missed their presence. I told her Danielle was busy, which was true, and that she sent her love, which may or may not have been true. My mother nodded and let it go, because she was graceful about things she couldn’t change.

Chapter Five: The Call at 7 A.M.

The morning of the funeral, Danielle’s phone rang just after seven. She went into the other room to take the call. When she came back, she was already composed in a way that told me the decision had been made before the call ended.

She said there was a crisis with a major client. She said her company needed her in Chicago that day. She said she knew the timing was terrible and she was devastated, but she didn’t have a choice.

I looked at her and felt the particular exhaustion of a person who has been managing too many things for too long, and I said, “Go.” I meant it. I was too hollowed out to argue, and I didn’t want to spend my mother’s funeral day in a fight.

She hugged me. She said she was so sorry. She said she would be there in spirit. She left with her bag already packed, which I noted somewhere in the back of my mind and chose not to examine.

In the church, the chair beside me stayed empty. People asked where Danielle was, and I told them she had an emergency at work. I said it the way you say things when you’ve already accepted a version of events and just need everyone around you to accept it too. I said it carefully, the way you protect someone without even deciding to. I didn’t know yet how much I was protecting her from herself, or how little she deserved it.

Chapter Six: The Gas Station

After the burial, I drove back alone. My mother’s coat was on the back seat. I had brought it to the funeral home and hadn’t had a clear moment to decide what to do with it, so it had ridden there and back with me, folded over the edge of the seat. The funeral program was there too, and some of the white flowers from the arrangement the funeral director had given me when it was over.

I was on autopilot, taking a route I had driven so many times that my hands did the work without much involvement from the rest of me. I stopped for gas near a cluster of hotels that sat close to the airport. It wasn’t a conscious detour. The tank was getting low and the station was there and my hands just went. I pulled in and sat for a moment before getting out, looking at my phone, doing nothing in particular.

That was when I saw her.

Danielle came through the entrance of the hotel across the road, pulling a carry-on. I recognized the navy one she took on business trips because it fit under the seat. She was wearing the gray jacket she put on when she wanted to look effortless. She looked the way she looked when she was in her element — unhurried and easy in her own skin. It took me a full three seconds to process what I was looking at, because my brain was still in the church, still at the graveside, still somewhere in the six hours of the morning that had already happened.

A man came out behind her. He reached for the handle of her bag and she let him take it. Then he put his arm around her shoulders, and she turned toward him, and they kissed. Not a quick kiss, not a greeting, but the kind that exists between two people who have been doing this for a while and feel entitled to it in public. They were laughing when they separated. She was the kind of laughing I hadn’t seen from her in months.

They walked toward the shuttle that was idling at the curb and got on it without looking back.

Chapter Seven: The Recording

I didn’t get out of my car. I didn’t call her name. I didn’t do any of the things I had imagined I would do if I ever found myself in a situation like this one, because I had never actually imagined finding myself in this situation. And the instructions I had given myself in the abstract bore no resemblance to what I was capable of in reality.

What I did was reach for my phone and record it. The hotel entrance, the shuttle, the two of them boarding, the timestamp at the corner of the screen showing the date — which was the date of my mother’s funeral, which was the same date Danielle had told me she couldn’t be with me because of a work emergency.

When the shuttle pulled away, I sat in the gas station for a while without moving. Then my phone vibrated. A message from Danielle: still stuck in the meeting, she might have to stay an extra night in Chicago, she was thinking of me.

I read it twice. I thought about the coat on the back seat and the empty chair and the six hours outside the ICU three months ago when she had told me she was with a client. I thought about how many times I had accepted an explanation that I had never actually verified because I trusted her, and because trusting the people you love is what you’re supposed to do.

I typed back that it was fine, that she should stay as long as she needed, that work came first. She sent back a heart. I put my phone down and drove the rest of the way home.

Chapter Eight: Collecting Evidence

I did not confront her that night when she returned. I did not confront her the next night or the night after. I held the video on my phone, and I let her talk about Chicago and the client and the extra night, and I listened and nodded and asked questions, and I collected every detail she gave me in the same quiet way you collect evidence when you already know the verdict but still need to understand the full shape of what happened.

I was not doing this from a place of strategy or calculation, at least not entirely. I was doing it because I had just buried my mother, and I was not capable of also having the conversation that everything I was carrying required. I needed to understand what I was actually dealing with before I decided what to do about it. And I needed the space to do that without Danielle knowing I had started looking.

The name I learned later was Bryce Dalton. That came from a booking confirmation that arrived in the shared email account we still used for household logistics. He had been copied on a reservation confirmation, which told me that someone in their arrangement had gotten comfortable enough to stop being careful. His name led to a professional profile that placed him in the same industry as Danielle, the same regional territory, the same conference circuit — which meant the overlap wasn’t accidental and wasn’t recent, which meant it had been happening inside the life we shared, using the same business infrastructure she used to explain her absences to me.

I didn’t know all of this on that first night, but I knew enough to understand that what I had seen outside the hotel was not an isolated incident, and I knew that whatever I was going to do next, I was going to do it with complete information rather than in the blind heat of a grief-soaked afternoon.

Chapter Nine: The Picture Assembles Itself

The picture that assembled itself over the following two weeks was one of those things that becomes clearer the more you look at it, until you reach the point where you can’t understand how you didn’t see it sooner. That’s not quite accurate either. I had seen pieces of it. I just hadn’t let myself arrange them into the shape they were actually making. That’s a different problem, and a more honest one to admit.

I went through the accounts I had access to — the joint checking, the household credit card we’d shared for years, the family email address we’d set up when we first bought the house and still used for things like utility confirmations and shared subscriptions. I wasn’t doing anything that required a password I didn’t already have. I was just looking systematically at things I had been not looking at for somewhere between eight months and longer.

The hotel names appeared first. Resorts and boutique properties in cities Danielle had mentioned as work destinations. Miami, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, and Chicago. Always Chicago. But the billing pattern on these was inconsistent with a corporate travel account. Some charges appeared on the household card rather than her company card, which meant they were either personal expenses that had been miscategorized, or they were personal expenses she hadn’t bothered to hide because she assumed I wouldn’t look. I was inclined toward the second explanation.

Bryce Dalton’s name confirmed itself through cross-referencing. Once I had it from the booking confirmation, I could trace his presence in the same cities on the same dates without much difficulty. He was real. He was consistent. And he had been in Danielle’s itinerary — the actual one, not the version she shared with me — for most of the past year. I estimated the relationship had been going on for at least eight months, possibly longer, which meant it had started while my mother was still alive, while I was still coming home from the hospital and the pharmacy and the insurance company and trying to show up for a marriage at the end of days that had already taken everything I had.

Chapter Ten: The ICU Night, Revisited

The discovery about the ICU night came last, and it landed differently than the rest of it. I had known for two weeks that Danielle had been with Bryce on the day of my mother’s funeral. I had watched the video enough times that I no longer needed to watch it to see it. But when the hotel record for that specific October night turned up — a beachside resort, two guests, dates that matched the night I sat outside the ICU alone, telling myself that some circumstances just required a person to manage alone — something shifted in how I understood what the previous eight months had actually been.

The funeral hadn’t been an exception. It had been a continuation.

Chapter Eleven: The Lawyer and Tessa

I met with a lawyer in the second week, an attorney I knew through a colleague who handled family law, straightforward, experienced, the kind of person who explains your options without making you feel like you’ve already decided what to do. I brought what I had — the credit card records, the Bryce connection, the general timeline. I didn’t bring the video yet, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it and I needed to understand the legal landscape before I decided. The attorney walked me through the divorce process, the asset considerations, the documentation that would matter and the documentation that wouldn’t.

I told Tessa, my sister, during this period, because I couldn’t carry it entirely alone, and because she was the person who knew both of us well enough to help me think without telling me what to feel. Tessa has always been the person in my life who can be furious on your behalf while still thinking clearly, which is a rare combination and exactly what I needed. She was angry in the specific way that someone gets angry when something confirms a suspicion they had been hoping was wrong.

She told me to be careful with the video. Not careful about using it, but careful about when. She said the right moment would come and I would know it, and that using it too early for the wrong reasons would only make me feel temporarily better while losing the chance to use it for the right ones. I thought about that a lot in the days that followed.

Chapter Twelve: The Photo on the Side Table

Danielle came home from what I understood was a genuine business trip and walked directly to the framed photo of my mother that I’d put on the side table in the living room. It was a picture from three years ago, before the illness had changed her face, at a picnic in the backyard of the house she’d lived in for forty years. She looked exactly like herself in it. I’d put it there the day after the funeral because I wanted her somewhere I could see her when I came downstairs in the morning.

Danielle stood in front of it and cried. She said she wished she could have said goodbye. She said it softly, with her back to me, in a voice that had the quality of genuine grief rather than performed grief. That confused me for a moment, because I had grown so accustomed to parsing what was real in what she said that I couldn’t always tell immediately.

I stood in the doorway and watched her. Then I asked her the question. I said, “If you could go back to that morning, would you still choose the meeting?”

Danielle turned around and said she hadn’t had a choice. She said it directly, without hesitating, looking at me with the expression of a person who believes the statement they’re making. I looked back at her and understood something I had been arriving at slowly but had not yet fully accepted: she was not going to stop. Not because she couldn’t — she was intelligent enough to have stopped long ago if she’d wanted to — but because she had found a version of events that worked for her, and she had no reason to revise it. The lie had become the story, and the story had become the truth she was living in.

Chapter Thirteen: The Papers on the Table

I went to the kitchen and came back with the divorce papers. I set them on the table. I told her I knew about Bryce.

What followed was not what I expected, which I suppose means I still had expectations about who she was that the evidence hadn’t fully corrected. She didn’t go immediately to honesty. She went to denial first, then minimization. It wasn’t what I thought. It had only been a few months. It hadn’t meant anything. I needed to understand that our marriage had already been falling apart before any of this started. She said that last part with particular conviction, as if repetition could retroactively make it accurate.

I let her finish. I didn’t argue with any of it. I said the lawyers would handle the details, and I asked her to leave for the night. She did, eventually, after a conversation that lasted longer than necessary and accomplished less than she hoped. By the time she walked out the door, I was certain about two things: that the divorce was the right decision, and that whatever Danielle chose to do next would tell me more about her than anything she had said in the past hour.

Chapter Fourteen: The Story She Told

What she chose to do next told me a great deal. Within days, she had started managing the story. The version she circulated among our shared friends and her professional network positioned her as a woman who had made a painful but necessary decision to leave a marriage that had stopped working. She described years of feeling unseen. She described my caregiving role — the actual years I had spent being my mother’s primary support — as evidence that I had prioritized everyone else over her. She described Bryce as someone who had appeared after the marriage was already over, which contradicted the timeline by a significant margin, but which her audience had no way of verifying, because they only had her account.

She posted a tribute to my mother on social media, a photo of the two of them from a few years back, the kind of image that makes people stop scrolling. She wrote about regret and about circumstances that kept her from saying goodbye. The comments filled up with sympathies. A few people we both knew told me that I shouldn’t be too hard on her, that she had clearly been suffering too, that grief took different forms.

I read every message and I said nothing. I was not ready to correct the record publicly, and I was not yet sure I should. But I was watching, and I was keeping a file.

Chapter Fifteen: The Speech

And when she showed up at a company event two months later, on Bryce’s arm, and gave a speech about learning to prioritize herself and recognizing the relationships that had held her back — a speech delivered to an audience that included people who had attended my mother’s funeral and people who had since heard only Danielle’s version of what happened — I understood that the moment Tessa had told me to wait for had arrived.

I was there that evening because a colleague of Danielle’s had invited me separately, someone who had watched the situation unfold with more accuracy than most, and who thought, without saying so directly, that my presence might be worth something. I hadn’t planned to use the video that night. I had planned to watch and see what Danielle did in a room full of people who believed her.

What she did was give me the opening I needed by standing at a microphone and asking everyone present to accept a version of the past year that omitted the most important facts. She had told the room half the story. I had the other half on my phone, and the date in the corner of the video was not going to require any explanation.

Chapter Sixteen: The Recognition Dinner

The event was a quarterly recognition dinner that Danielle’s company hosted for high performers, held at a venue downtown with a rooftop terrace and the kind of ambient lighting designed to make everyone look like they belonged somewhere important. I arrived midway through cocktail hour, before the formal program began, which gave me time to understand the room. There were colleagues of Danielle’s I recognized, clients I had met at company functions over the years, a few mutual friends who had heard her version of the past several months and who watched me cross the room with expressions that fell somewhere between surprise and discomfort.

Danielle saw me from across the terrace. The conversation she was in continued, but her attention had changed. I could see it in the slight rearrangement of her posture, the careful way she kept her face from showing what she was thinking. Bryce was beside her, close in the way of a couple who have become comfortable in public. He watched me with the specific interest of a man who has been told a story about someone and is now meeting that person for the first time.

She came over eventually, when the cocktail portion had wound down and people were moving inside. She spoke quietly, with the particular tone she used when she wanted to manage a situation before it became one. She asked what I was doing there. I told her I had been invited by someone who thought my presence might be worth something. She said she hoped I wasn’t there to make things difficult. I said I was there to listen to her speech.

Chapter Seventeen: “There Are People Who Appear”

The dinner unfolded in the normal way that these things unfold — a recognition of quarterly achievements, some remarks from company leadership, the particular energy of people who are celebrating professional wins they have worked hard for. I sat at the table my colleague had arranged, and I ate dinner, and I listened, and I did not do anything that required explanation.

Danielle spent most of the meal at a table near the front with Bryce and a group of colleagues, and I watched her the way I had been watching her for two months now — carefully, without making it obvious.

When she took the microphone, the room settled into the attentive quiet of an audience that is fond of the speaker. She thanked the company. She acknowledged the year’s achievements. Then she shifted into the personal section of the speech that I had been expecting without knowing I was expecting it. She talked about a year of difficult choices. She talked about the courage it required to step away from things that were no longer serving her. She talked about relationships that had kept her smaller than she needed to be, and the people who had appeared in her life when she had finally made space for them.

She looked at Bryce when she said this last part. Bryce nodded with the expression of someone who believes they are part of a story that began after the one that came before it was already finished.

“There are people who appear when you’re at your lowest point,” she said, “and remind you that you deserve to be loved.”

The room responded warmly. Several people at my table nodded along.

Chapter Eighteen: Two Minutes

I looked at my phone, where the video had been sitting for two months, and I thought about what Tessa had said — that the right moment would come and I would know it. I knew it.

When there was a natural transition in the program and the floor was open for brief remarks from others being recognized, I stood up. I asked the room for two minutes. The evening had been that kind of event, informal enough that the request didn’t require permission, just confidence.

I said Danielle had just described the past year as one in which she had found the courage to step away from what wasn’t working. I said I respected that framing. I said there was one detail that I thought added important context to the story she had shared, and that I wanted to offer it since we were all apparently talking about what that year had actually looked like.

I connected my phone to the display system that had been running the company’s presentation materials — my colleague had arranged the technical access earlier in the evening, understanding that I might need it. The video played on the screen the whole room had been watching. It ran for about forty-five seconds. The timestamp was visible in the corner. The hotel entrance, the rolling suitcase, the man who walked out to meet her and put his arm around her shoulders, the kiss that lasted longer than a greeting, the two of them boarding the airport shuttle.

The date in the corner of the video was the date of my mother’s funeral.

Chapter Nineteen: The Room Reads the Timestamp

The room was quiet in the way that rooms get quiet when something unexpected has replaced all the ambient social noise at once. I watched people read the timestamp. I watched them process it. People who had nodded along to Danielle’s speech a few minutes earlier were now looking at the screen, and then looking at her, and then looking at the screen again. The mutual friends who had told me to be patient with her were sitting very still. Some of Danielle’s colleagues, people who had heard her describe a suffocating marriage and a husband who had chosen his mother over her, were looking at the date and doing the arithmetic that the date required.

I showed the screenshot of the text message next — the one she had sent me at roughly the same time the video was recorded, telling me she was still in the meeting, that she wished she could be with me. Both images were on the screen simultaneously. The room could read them without any help from me.

I said Danielle had told me she couldn’t attend my mother’s funeral because of a work emergency in Chicago. I said I had stood in front of our family that morning and told them she was working. I said the chair beside me during the service had been empty. I said I wanted to provide the complete picture, since the evening had been about honesty and what the past year had actually looked like for the people involved in it.

Then I sat down.

Chapter Twenty: “When”

Danielle came across the room and said quietly to turn it off. I said she had already told everyone about that day. I said I had only added the images. She said this wasn’t the place for it. I said she had chosen the place when she decided to give that speech, at that microphone, to this specific room.

Bryce had been watching the exchange from near his table. He came over and said something to Danielle that I couldn’t fully hear, but the word he used twice was the word when — as in, when had I found out, when had I known. Danielle didn’t answer him in a way he found satisfying. He looked at the timestamp on the screen again, and I watched him recalculate the timeline he had been given. The one in which the marriage was already over before he entered the picture. The one in which he had been an ending rather than an overlap.

He asked her directly whether I had known about them when the trip was happening. The silence that followed that question was longer than it should have been if the answer was straightforward.

I walked out of the event before the program resumed. Danielle left shortly after, and from what I understood in the weeks that followed, the two of them spent some time in the uncomfortable space between explanation and conclusion before Bryce eventually stopped returning her calls. The evening had made it clear that the version of events he had accepted required more revision than he was willing to do.

Chapter Twenty-One: The Reversal

In the weeks after the event, the reversal was neither dramatic nor total, but it was real. People who had been sympathetic to Danielle’s version of events began to ask different questions. The colleagues who had heard her describe years of neglect reconsidered what they knew. The mutual friends who had urged patience with her reached out to me, some to apologize for their earlier reactions, some simply to say they were sorry about my mother, which they had not said before because they had been distracted by the other version of the story. Evelyn’s family, who had loved Danielle and not understood her absence from the funeral, finally understood it.

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Visit

Danielle came to see me six weeks later. She came without Bryce and without a prepared argument, which was itself a shift. She sat across from me and said she knew she had done something that couldn’t be undone, and she said it with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been carrying the weight of a choice and has finally stopped trying to redistribute that weight onto other people.

She said the thing she was most sorry for was my mother. Not abstractly, not performatively, but in the specific and concrete way of someone who had loved a person and had nonetheless chosen to be somewhere else on the day the people who loved her said goodbye.

I listened. I said that forgiveness was a thing I could do for myself, but that it wasn’t the same as going back. And I thought she understood the difference. She said she did.

I signed the remaining divorce papers at a neutral location on a Thursday afternoon. We were civil. We were even briefly warm, in the particular way of people who have a long history and have arrived somewhere that wasn’t the destination they intended.

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Letter

About a year after my mother’s funeral, I drove to the cemetery on the anniversary of the day she was buried. I brought dahlias, which she had always preferred to cut flowers because she said they kept longer. I had a letter with me — the one Danielle had sent a few weeks earlier, handwritten on plain paper, which I had received and not immediately read because I hadn’t been ready to.

I read it there, sitting by the gravestone. She wrote that the thing she regretted most was not losing Bryce, and not the public accounting that had undone her version of events, and not the damage to her reputation at work. She wrote that the thing she regretted most was Evelyn — that my mother had loved her without conditions for eight years, had called her daughter and meant it, and that Danielle had repaid that love by being somewhere else on the day the people who loved Evelyn best were telling her goodbye.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Delete

I folded the letter and sat with it for a moment. Then I opened my phone. I went to the folder where the video had been sitting for a year — the hotel entrance, the timestamp, the kiss, all of it — and I pressed delete.

I wasn’t doing it because Danielle deserved to have it gone. I was doing it because I no longer needed it. The truth had been told. The people who mattered knew it. The video had served its purpose, and what I was holding on to by keeping it was not clarity, but weight.

I put my phone back in my pocket. I laid the dahlias against the base of the gravestone. I sat quietly for another few minutes, thinking about nothing in particular and everything at once, which is how that kind of sitting tends to go.

My phone buzzed. A message from a friend, asking if I was going to make it that evening to a gathering he was hosting. I typed back yes, that I would be there, that I was looking forward to it, and I meant all three things equally.

Chapter Twenty-Five: What My Mother Used to Say

I stood up. I took a last look at my mother’s name on the stone, at the dates that contained her whole life between them, at the flowers that would be there for a few days before they faded. Then I turned and walked back to my car, and I drove toward the evening that was waiting.

My mother used to say the truest thing about a person is what they do when they think no one is watching. I think she was right. And I think she would have been glad to know that in the end, someone was watching.