She waited until most people had left before telling me the rest. She said that in 2009, when they were still married, doctors had confirmed he was infertile after months of testing. But that wasn’t the part she’d been trying to tell me. She pulled an old photo from her phone showing a document she’d kept because she’d never understood why he’d been so angry about it. His diagnosis wasn’t simply infertility. There was a note saying he had been advised to tell any future partner before attempting fertility treatment. He never told me.
I asked her why he’d spent nineteen years letting me believe the problem was mine. She said he had done the same thing with her at first. He’d told her the doctors thought she had a hormonal problem and convinced her to undergo treatment. Then, years later, when she finally requested his records herself, she discovered he’d known the truth from the beginning. She had confronted him, and he promised he’d never do that to another woman. I believed her until she showed me the date of the document she’d saved. It was from six months before he met me.
Then she told me something I wasn’t prepared for. She said my husband had contacted her two years before he died and asked whether she still had those records. He wanted to know if she’d ever told me. She hadn’t. He apparently told her, “She still thinks it’s her fault, and I can’t change that now.” I sat in my car outside the funeral home with nineteen years of memories suddenly rearranging themselves. Then his ex-wife opened her glove compartment and handed me a sealed envelope. She said he’d given it to her last year and told her not to open it unless he died before I found out the truth.
