I raised my fiancé’s ten children after he walked out on us — thirty years later, his lawyer showed up at my door and said, “He asked me to give you this envelope today.”

coworker, a friend of Derrick’s baseball coach.

But the conversations always ended the same way.

“Ten children?” One man said, setting down his coffee as if it had burned him.

“Yes,” I told him. “Ten.”

He never called again.

After a while, I stopped pretending there was room for dating. My evenings belonged to homework, baths, school lunches, fevers, bills,continue reading …