Shippagan — Sunday started off just like every other weekend day for the Leclaire family. The morning was filled with coffee, crêpes, fresh fruit and reading social media posts to find out what friends and family members had been up to the night before.
“One of my co-workers posted something cryptic earlier on Saturday and I really wanted to see how that turned out,” recalled the patriarch of the family, Harold Leclaire. “He said something along the lines of ‘Gonna be a heck of a night tonight’ and I was dying to know what went on.”
What started out as a nice family-oriented morning around the breakfast table quickly turned sour as one poor decision by Harold drove a potentially permanent wedge between himself and his family.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he lamented. “I just wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing– I never meant to hurt anyone.”
As Harold scrolled past selfies, pictures of babies, cats and food, he allegedly also made a bold statement about his affection toward his wife of 14 years by scrolling right past a picture of a heart that read “Share this heart if you love your wife.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” cried a still-shaken Tammy Leclaire, who was secretly watching her husband as he scrolled through his Facebook feed. “I’ve given this man the best years of my life. I gave him a daughter and son and have always shared anything like that I’ve seen on Facebook — how could he do this to me?”
Harold insisted to our reporter that it was merely an oversight and that he very much loves his now-estranged wife. “Of course I love her!” he declared. “I was just looking for something specific and I was going to come back to that post and share it on my wall, and even tag her in my status later in the day — I swear it.”
The Manatee discovered that the original post came from one of Tammy’s longtime friends, Debbie Haley who lives in Shediac. “I knew it, I always knew it,” she told our reporter. “I just always felt that Harold didn’t love her like she deserved, and now I’ve got the evidence to prove it.”
It turns out that this was an elaborately planned out scheme of Debbie’s to prove her long-running suspicion that her best friend’s husband wasn’t as in love as he seemed to be.
“For years I’ve been telling her about my suspicions and she just wouldn’t believe me,” Haley confessed. “Every time she’d start to listen to my theories he’d go do something sweet to fool her again. He’d send her flowers out of the blue, buy her jewelry, plan vacations without the kids, buy a full-page newspaper ad declaring his eternal love for her — I was really confident that he wouldn’t share that meme I posted and then she’d finally see him for the shallow man he is.”
Tammy, who moved in with her mother this morning, isn’t sure what the future holds for her marriage. “I’m sure I’ll never be able to look at him the same way after he hurt me like that, but I hope that someday he’ll find someone to love — and then I hope she rips out his heart like he did to me.”