“Did he buy you that ring?”
“Yes.”
“And the marriage certificate?”
Her voice broke.
“It’s real.”
I hung up.
For several minutes, I couldn’t move.
Then I heard a car pull into the driveway.
Mark.
He had come home early.
I quickly placed the laptop back where I had found it and walked into the kitchen.
The front door opened.
“Hey, honey,” he called casually. “You’re home?”
I turned toward him.
“Mark, we need to talk.”
He stopped.
Something in my voice must have told him that the weekend was over.
“What happened?”
I looked at his left hand.
“Where’s your wedding ring?”
His face went pale.
For the first time in twelve years, my husband had absolutely nothing to say.
I took a breath.
“Who is Rebecca?”
The silence that followed told me everything.
Then Mark sat down heavily at the kitchen table.
And when he finally spoke, his first words weren’t an apology.
They were:
“You weren’t supposed to find out like this.”
I stared at him.
“Like what, Mark? Finding out that my husband has another wife?”
He covered his face with both hands.
“I can explain.”
“Then explain.”
He looked up at me, his eyes red.
“Rebecca and I got married because I thought you were going to leave me.”
I almost laughed.
“Leave you? I’ve spent twelve years building a life with you.”
He shook his head.
“You don’t understand. There are things you don’t know about our marriage.”
My stomach tightened.
“What things?”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded envelope.
He placed it on the table between us.
“Before you decide what to do,” he said quietly, “you need to read this.”
I opened the envelope.
Inside was a letter from a lawyer.
And the first sentence made my entire body go cold.
It said that Mark had been preparing to transfer ownership of our house months before his fishing trip.
But the house wasn’t the only thing he had been hiding.
At the bottom of the letter was a name I recognized immediately.
My father’s.
I looked up at Mark.
“What does my father have to do with this?”
Mark stared at the floor.
Then he whispered:
“Your father knew about Rebecca before I married her.”
And suddenly, the woman I had blamed for destroying my marriage wasn’t the only person I needed answers from.
Because my father had been dead for six months.
And whatever secret he had taken to his grave…
Mark was about to tell me why he’d kept it
next page