…legally married to him.”
My husband, Steven, read the note twice and laughed in a way I had never heard before. “Your mother was a paranoid old woman.”
I took the papers back from him. My mother’s attorney, Mr. Grant, had told me that morning to read everything before I spoke to Steven about the house. I hadn’t had time. Now I read it standing between the graves.
Six months before she died, my mother had found a photo in a box of Steven’s old things while she was helping us clean the attic. A wedding photo. Steven in his twenties, with a dark-haired woman who wasn’t me. On the back: “Steven and Carol, June 1994.”
Steven had told me he’d never been married before. My mother didn’t believe him. She hired a private investigator.
The investigator found Carol Hughes in less than three weeks. She was alive and working as a nurse at Mercy General Hospital, two hours away. The photograph on the last page had been taken outside the hospital entrance. There was no record of a divorce. Steven had simply left her in 1996 and moved to another state.
“He’s still married to her,” Mr. Grant told me when I called him from the car. “Which means your marriage was never legal. And it means he has no claim to your mother’s estate or to the house.”
The house had been a wedding gift from my parents. It had always been in my name and my mother’s name. But Steven had been planning to argue in court that after twenty-seven years, half of it was his.
Not anymore.
I drove to Mercy General the next week. Carol knew who I was before I said a word. My mother had called her five months earlier. They had talked for three hours.
“She told me she wanted you to be protected after she was gone,” Carol said. “She asked me to tell you the truth if you ever came looking.”
Carol had spent two years searching for Steven after he vanished. She’d assumed he was dead. She never remarried because she couldn’t prove she was free to.
Steven’s girlfriend, Brianna, was the next person to find out. She showed up at my door three days later, holding the annulment petition my lawyer had filed. Steven had told her the divorce would be quick and easy. She didn’t know about Carol either.
I told her the only thing I could: “Get a lawyer before you sign anything with his name on it.”
The annulment was granted. Steven was charged with bigamy, and Carol finally got her divorce, nearly thirty years late. He had to move out of my house by Friday. The same Friday he’d given me.
I planted my mother’s funeral flowers in her old garden behind the house. Every spring they come back. Every spring I thank her for finding out the truth when I couldn’t.
