“We didn’t have a marriage license.”
His voice shook.
“Nothing had been filed. The minister told us he could perform a blessing and vows, but the state wouldn’t recognize it.”
“But you considered yourselves married.”
Daniel finally looked at me.
“Yes.”
Suddenly, twenty years of jokes made sense.
Anything for the second wife.
I wasn’t legally his second wife.
But to the twenty-five-year-old man on that television, Joanna had been his first.
Then I noticed the pendant.
Even through the grainy VHS picture, I recognized it.
The same small gold pendant Daniel had given me.
My hand went instinctively to my throat.
“What happened to her?”
Daniel closed his eyes.
“She died six days later.”
I couldn’t speak.
The anger I’d carried since dinner didn’t disappear.
It simply collided with something else.
Compassion.
Grief.
Confusion.
Jealousy that immediately made me feel ashamed.
A strange sorrow for a woman who had died years before I ever met Daniel.
