I woke up to strange sounds in the dark—low humming at first, almost like a lullaby whispered through clenched teeth. My eyes fluttered open, disoriented, still half lost in sleep. Then the humming turned into giggling. Soft at first. Then louder. Unfamiliar. Wrong.
His arms flapped awkwardly against the blankets, as if he were struggling to swim through invisible water. His head jerked slightly from side to side. His lips moved, forming broken syllables that made no sense. His eyes were rolled back beneath twitching lids. For a split second my mind refused to process what I was seeing. This wasn’t a dream. This was my husband—my calm, quiet, controlled husband—convulsing gently beside me like a stranger wearing his face.
I screamed his name.
He didn’t respond.
Panic ripped through me. My hands shook as I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and dialed 911 with fingers that barely obeyed me. My voice broke as I explained what was happening, that my husband was unresponsive, making strange sounds, that I didn’t know what to do. The dispatcher tried to keep me calm, but time collapsed into a blur of fear and noise.
By the time the paramedics arrived, Sayed had gone still. Too still.
They loaded him onto a stretcher under the harsh glare of our hallway light. His face looked peaceful, as if nothing violent had just passed through his body. That terrified me more than the seizure itself. I rode in the ambulance beside him, clutching his cold hand while machines beeped around us. I kept whispering his name, afraid that if I stopped, he would drift farther away.
At the hospital, doctors moved with clinical speed and quiet efficiency. Tests. Scans. Bloodwork. Hours passed in a cold waiting room that smelled like disinfectant and burnt coffee. When they finally spoke to me, their explanation sounded almost reassuring.
“A mild seizure,” the doctor said calmly. “Likely triggered by stress or sleep deprivation. We don’t see signs of neurological disease at this point.”
Stress.
Sleep deprivation.
The words floated through me without landing. Sayed had been stressed for months. Barely sleeping. Always distracted. Always somewhere else, even when he was sitting right beside me.
I watched him through the thick glass of his hospital room. A mask covered the lower half of his face. Wires traced across his chest. He looked fragile, reduced, like a version of himself I’d never known. A nurse stepped quietly beside me.
“Has your husband shown any unusual behavior lately?” she asked gently.
I opened my mouth to say no.
The lie rose easily, practiced by months of denial.
But it caught in my throat.
Because deep down, I knew better.
For nearly a year, Sayed had been unraveling in ways I pretended not to see. It started subtly. Longer hours at work. Phone always face-down. Quick exits when messages came through. I told myself this was normal. Everyone was overwhelmed. The world was unstable. We were all carrying invisible weight.
But then came the late nights.
He would slip out of bed after midnight, claiming he couldn’t sleep. I’d hear the low murmur of his voice from the balcony, the living room, the bathroom. When I asked who he was talking to, he’d shrug.
“Work,” he said. “You know how it is.”
I stopped pressing. I wanted to be the understanding wife. The supportive partner.
Then one night, as he stepped out to take another call, his phone buzzed again on the bedside table. A name flashed across the screen.
Nadia.
I stared at it as if it might rearrange itself into something harmless if I waited long enough. When he returned, I asked about her with forced casualness.
“A coworker,” he said without hesitation. “She’s been having a rough time.”
The explanation didn’t match the tension in his voice. Or his hands, which trembled slightly as he placed the phone back in his pocket.
Still, I let it go.
I always let it go.
Because the alternative meant admitting my marriage was changing into something unfamiliar. Something unstable. And I was already exhausted from the world pressing in from every side—finances tightening, plans dissolving, a constant underlying fear that never fully lifted.
So I stayed quiet.
Until the night I woke up to laughter that didn’t belong to the man I loved.
Now, standing outside his hospital room, that sound replayed in my head on a loop. The humming. The flapping arms. The giggle that sounded younger than him. Wilder. Not his.
The nurse waited patiently for my answer.
“Yes,” I finally whispered. “He’s been different.”
She nodded as if she had expected that. As if she had seen this before.
Sayed was released two days later with instructions to rest, reduce stress, and follow up with a neurologist. Life attempted to return to normal. But something inside me had shifted permanently. The fragile version of him behind the hospital glass had cracked the illusion I’d been preserving.
At home, he was distant but overly attentive at the same time. He brought me tea I didn’t ask for. Apologized for worrying me. Promised to slow down.
And yet, his phone never left his hand.
The messages resumed.
The night calls continued.
And Nadia’s name stayed lodged in my mind like a splinter under the skin.
One afternoon, while Sayed showered, his phone buzzed on the coffee table. Once. Twice. Three times. I told myself not to look. I told myself that trust meant respecting privacy.
But fear is louder than principles.
I picked it up.
The screen wasn’t locked.
The message thread was already open.
Nadia:
“Did it happen again?”
“You scared me last time.”
“You promised you’d tell her.”
My body went cold.
I scrolled.
There were voice notes. Long ones. Dozens of late-night messages filled with worry, intimacy, coded references I didn’t understand. Sayed talking about “episodes.” About “slipping.” About how he sometimes didn’t remember what he’d said or done.
And then I found the pictures.
Not explicit. Not romantic.
Videos.
Of Sayed.
Laughing in his sleep.
Flapping his arms.
Murmuring in a strange, childlike voice.
The same sounds that had jolted me awake days earlier.
Recorded.
Sent to Nadia.
My hands shook so violently I nearly dropped the phone. I felt as though I were standing at the edge of a cliff, the ground beneath my marriage quietly crumbling.
When he came out of the shower, towel around his waist, I was still seated on the couch with his phone in my hands.
We stared at each other.
For a long time, neither of us spoke.
Finally, he sat down slowly. His shoulders slumped in surrender.
“She’s not what you think,” he said quietly.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t accuse.
I simply asked, “Then what is she?”
Tears welled in his eyes. Real ones.
“She’s the only one who knows,” he whispered. “About the other life.”
The words made my chest tighten.
He told me then.
About the sleepwalking that had started months ago. The dissociative episodes. The online forum where he’d met Nadia—an insomniac therapist who specialized in sleep disorders. About how he was terrified I’d think he was broken. Or dangerous.
“Sometimes I wake up with messages on my phone that I don’t remember sending,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up laughing. Sometimes crying.”
“You were living two lives,” I said softly.
“Yes,” he admitted. “And I was losing control of both.”
The room felt eerily quiet after his confession. The betrayal wasn’t romantic in nature, but it cut just as deep. Because while I had been lying awake beside him night after night, he’d been sharing the darkest parts of himself with someone else.
Not because he loved her.
But because he was afraid of me seeing him unravel.
We sat in silence for a long time after that.
Eventually, I stood and placed his phone on the table between us.
“We don’t survive secrets,” I said. “But we might survive this—if you’re honest now.”
He nodded through tears.
That night, as we fell asleep under the same roof for the first time without hidden messages or locked screens, I listened carefully to his breathing.
There was no humming.
No laughter.
Just the fragile sound of two people awake in the dark, finally facing the truth together.
