…a spouse and two dependents who aren’t his.”
The room went silent. The woman with the two teenage boys sat back down slowly. My husband, Richard, closed his eyes.
“Her name is Ellen,” he said into the silence. “She’s my brother’s widow. Those are my nephews.”
Seventeen years ago, Richard’s younger brother, Mark, was killed in a construction accident. He had no life insurance. Ellen was left with two babies and no job. Richard paid for their groceries for a year. Then Ellen’s youngest was diagnosed with a heart condition that needed surgery, and they had no health insurance.
So Richard did something illegal. He told the company’s HR department he’d remarried and listed Ellen and the boys as his family on his company health plan. To make the story believable at work, he told his secretary and a few colleagues that I was his “first wife” and that we’d divorced.
For seventeen years, he kept both stories going. At home, I was his only wife. At work, Ellen was.
I didn’t know whether to scream or cry. So I did neither. I walked over to Ellen and asked the boys’ names. The youngest, Sam, was seventeen. He’d had three heart surgeries. He was healthy now because of that insurance.
The company president asked to speak with Richard privately. By the end of the night, Richard had confessed everything to HR. He offered to repay every dollar the company had paid.
The company didn’t press charges. Richard repaid what he could from his pension. The president, it turned out, had lost a brother too.
I was angry with Richard for a long time. Not for helping them. For lying to me about it for seventeen years. “You would have said yes,” he admitted. “I know you would have. I just didn’t want you to carry it.”
Ellen and the boys come to Sunday dinner now. Sam calls me Aunt Linda. Last month, he got into college to study nursing. He said he wants to help people the way his uncle helped him.
