I drove to Sacred Heart on Sunday and found the secretary waiting for me before Mass. She recognized my husband’s name immediately and led me into a small office. On her desk was a folder he’d apparently kept there for years. She said he had instructed them never to contact me about it, but he’d also left a note saying that if I ever came looking, they were supposed to let me read everything. The first page was a list of dates — the first Sunday of every month, going back to 1991.
The secretary told me my husband hadn’t simply been making donations. He’d been meeting someone there. Always in the same room, always for less than an hour, and always alone. I asked who he’d been meeting, and she said the person had never given a name. Then she opened a second folder containing handwritten notes my husband had left after every visit. Most were only a sentence or two. The last one, dated two months before he died, said, “She still thinks I abandoned her. I need another year before I tell her why.”
I asked who “she” was. The secretary looked at me and said she’d been waiting for me to ask that question. She handed me an old photograph of a young woman standing outside the parish in 1991. I knew her face immediately — she was the woman my husband had once told me was his cousin, someone I had never met. But on the back of the photograph, in my husband’s handwriting, were the words: “My daughter. If my wife ever finds this, tell her why I let her believe for thirty-three years that this girl was dead…”
