I reread his letter.
When I married you, I sincerely believed I was free to do so.
For a moment, I was able to breathe again.
Then I read the following sentence.
Fourteen years later, I discovered that I wasn’t.
I folded the letter.
Mr. Geller stepped towards me.
“Robert?”
“Not now.”
“There are other documents that Irene wanted you to see.”
“I can’t read anything else while you’re here.”
He nodded, placed his card on the table and left.
Once the door was closed, I stood rooted to the spot in front of Irene’s handwriting.
So I screamed in the empty house.
“Who were you, Irene?”
My voice echoed in the rooms where our conversations had been the stage for sixty years of existence.
“You lied to me all these years?”
Irene had always answered me.
This time, she couldn’t.
I named our daughter Penelope because I couldn’t stay alone with the truth.
She lived nearby and had inherited Irene’s gift for distinguishing between “it’s okay” and the truth.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting next to me.
“My mother was married before me,” I told her.
Penelope stared into space.
“Before you?”
“When she was eighteen.”
“Did you know?”
For information purposes only:
“No.”
I showed him the letter.
“She thought the divorce was final. Fourteen years after our marriage, she discovered that it wasn’t.”
Penelope’s expression changed.
“So, when you married Mom…”
“She was still legally married to someone else.”
None of us spoke.
Then I continued reading.
Irene had found her first husband.
He too had been shocked.
He believed their divorce was finalized.
There was no hidden romance.
No second relationship.
No secret life.
A simple, old legal error.
Towards the bottom of the letter, Irene had written:
The rest is in the box where
