When I was five, Leo was my best friend. Before his family moved away, he hugged me and promised, \u201cOne day I\u2019ll come back and marry you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twenty years later, a man walked into my bakery looking exactly like him.<\/p>\n
\u201cMonica,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLeo?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI told you I\u2019d find you.\u201d<\/p>\n
For two years, we built a life together. He remembered childhood stories, charmed my family, and eventually proposed.<\/p>\n
But at our wedding, just before the vows, he stopped everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t marry you because you don\u2019t know who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he pulled out an old photograph of two nearly identical boys.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is Leo,\u201d he said, pointing at one.<\/p>\n
Then he touched his chest.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy name is Jake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leo had actually been his cousin. He had died from cancer three years earlier after asking Jake to find me and explain that he had never forgotten me.<\/p>\n
Jake came to my bakery intending to tell me, but when I mistook him for Leo and threw myself into his arms, he allowed the lie to continue.<\/p>\n
I ended the wedding.<\/p>\n
Four months later, Jake sent me a letter introducing himself honestly for the first time.<\/p>\n
Eventually, we met again.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t erase what he had done, but I realized something painful: I had loved the man beside me for two years.<\/p>\n
I just never knew his real name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was five, Leo was my best friend. Before his family moved away, he hugged me and promised, \u201cOne day I\u2019ll come back and marry you.\u201d Twenty years later, a man walked into my bakery looking exactly like him. \u201cMonica,\u201d he said. \u201cLeo?\u201d \u201cI told you I\u2019d find you.\u201d For two years, we built …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9329,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327\/revisions\/9329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}