…”Daddy’s other house is a secret, and if I tell, you’ll be sad forever.”
I hung up.
I pulled the car over into a grocery store parking lot and turned around in my seat. My daughter, Emma, is six. She was crying without making any sound, the way kids do when they’ve been holding something in for a long time.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “I’m not sad at you. I could never be sad at you. Can you tell me about Daddy’s other house?”
She told me. Some Saturdays, when I worked, Daddy took her “on an adventure.” To a house with a yellow kitchen and a little girl named Lily, who called him Daddy too. He’d told Emma that Lily was her “special cousin,” and that it was their secret, and that if she ever told Mommy, I would cry forever and it would be her fault.
I held my daughter in the front seat of that car until she stopped shaking. Then I called my sister, who came and got Emma, and I called a lawyer.
I called Brittany that afternoon. I asked her, very carefully, why she’d listed the Whitakers as a reference.
There was a long pause. Then she said, “Because I figured it out. I worked for them for a year. I saw his mail with your address on it. I saw photos of your daughter on his phone. Mrs. Whitaker, his wife there, has no idea. I didn’t know how to tell either of you. So I applied for your job and put their number first. I thought if you called, you’d hear him, and you’d know.”
I didn’t hire her as a nanny. I hired her to testify. My lawyer took her statement the following week.
The other woman’s name is Megan. She’d been married to him for four years, in a church, with her family there. Our marriage came first, by six. Her marriage was never legal. She found out from my lawyer, by phone, while Lily was napping. She called me that night, and we cried together for an hour.
He’s facing charges for bigamy. I have full custody of Emma. He has supervised visits, when he shows up. Emma sees a child therapist every Thursday, who is helping her unlearn the idea that keeping a grown-up’s secret is ever her job.
Last month Emma asked if she could see Lily. Megan and I took the girls to a park. They ran straight for the swings, holding hands. “She’s not my cousin,” Emma told me later, very seriously. “She’s my sister. And that’s not a secret anymore.”
