I called the county clerk and asked for the complete divorce file, not just the decree. The marriage listed in 1994 wasn’t a simple first marriage that ended quietly. Bill had filed for divorce almost five years after our wedding, and the paperwork showed that his first wife had been living in another state the entire time. But she hadn’t disappeared from his life. There were letters from her attorney, payments made from an account Bill and I used together, and one handwritten note from Bill asking her to “please wait until I can make this right.” The signature at the bottom was unmistakably his.
I sat there staring at the woman’s name. It was my mother’s sister — the aunt everyone said had moved away after a family argument in the eighties. I called my mother and asked her directly whether she knew Bill had been married before me. There was a silence so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she said, “We knew he had a wife. We didn’t know he was still married when you married him.” I asked why nobody had ever told me. She said my aunt had made everyone promise not to speak about it because she believed Bill would eventually leave her properly. He never did until after our children were born.
Then I found the part that changed everything. The divorce petition said Bill and my aunt had separated in 1987, but it also listed a child born in 1989. I knew that date because it was the year Bill and I supposedly got married. I called my aunt for the first time in thirty-seven years. She answered, and before I could introduce myself, she said, “I wondered when you’d finally order that certificate.” I asked her about the child. She started crying and said Bill had told everyone the baby wasn’t his. Then she gave me the name — and it was the same name my daughter has used for her entire life.
