I asked him how he could marry me without telling me. I wasn’t yelling. I actually wasn’t. I think I was too tired already and it had only been twenty minutes. He wiped his face with the towel he was still holding, which he’d forgotten he was holding, and he said he married me because he fell in love with me and by the time that happened the secret had been sitting in the lining of that jacket for over a decade and he didn’t know how to take it out.

He said, “I kept the wallet because it’s all I have left of a boy who thinks his father is dead. The last time I held him, he was eight years old and he said, Daddy, when are you coming back. And I said soon. And that was eighteen years ago. And every night I look at that photo and I…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. I don’t know if he couldn’t or if there was nothing to finish. I didn’t ask him to finish it.

I sat there for a long time after he stopped talking. I kept thinking about the boy in the photo, who is now twenty-six years old somewhere and has no idea his father is alive and had a whole second life and a wife who didn’t know about him either. I kept thinking about what this man, my husband, whichever name you want to use, has been carrying. And also I kept thinking about what I have been carrying without knowing I was carrying it. A marriage to a person who doesn’t legally exist. A life built on a foundation I didn’t know was there.

I don’t know what I feel. That sounds like a cop-out but I mean it genuinely. I keep cycling through things. There’s the part of me that looks at him and sees the same person I married eight years ago. The one who remembers how I take my coffee and calls my mom on her birthday without being reminded and laughs at things that aren’t that funny just because I think they’re funny.

And then there’s the part of me that thinks about that little boy in the photo and what David, James, whoever, chose and why, and whether the person I thought I knew would have made that same choice.

He asked me what I needed from him. I said I didn’t know. He said he understood. He slept in the guest room that night and I didn’t ask him to, he just did it, and part of me was grateful and part of me hated that he’d made the considerate choice again because it made it harder to be as angry as I think I have a right to be.