I told my lawyer to stop reading for a minute because I knew the name before he even said it. It was my maiden name, written exactly the way I used to sign before I married my husband. I told him I had never signed an agreement with that woman, and he said he knew because the date on the document was from 2009, when my husband and I were already married and I had been using my married name for years. Then he turned the page over and showed me the notary stamp. The notary was a woman in Georgia, and I had never been to Georgia in my life. My lawyer called the number on the stamp, and the woman who answered said she remembered the signing because she’d handled the same agreement twice. I asked what she meant by twice, and she said the first version had been rejected because somebody’s identification didn’t match the signature.
I asked whose identification, and she said the person who signed as me. My lawyer immediately asked her to send whatever records she was legally able to provide, and when they arrived there was a copy of an identification document attached to the notary’s journal entry. It had my name on it, but it wasn’t my driver’s license. The photograph wasn’t me either. I had never seen the woman before. The notary said the woman had come in with my husband and the Georgia woman, and she’d told them she was my husband’s wife. I said that was ridiculous because I had never met either of them. Then my lawyer noticed something in the agreement that none of us had caught before: the monthly payments weren’t for silence about money or business. They were for silence about a child. And the person receiving the payments had written one sentence in the margin beside the amount: “Until she knows.”
I asked the lawyer who the child was, and he said the agreement didn’t name one. It only referred to “the minor” and gave a date of birth. I knew the date immediately because it was eight months before my husband first told me he’d met me. I called the woman in Georgia myself and asked her what she had been paid to keep quiet about. She started crying and said my husband had promised that nobody would ever find out what happened that year. I asked why she was suing his estate now, after waiting two years, and she said because the person she’d been protecting had finally contacted her and told her she couldn’t keep lying. Then she gave me a name. It wasn’t a child’s name. It was the name of a woman who had been sending my husband Christmas cards for years. And when I looked at the last card she’d sent before he died, I realized she’d addressed it to “my brother.”
