I called Tish into my office on a Monday night. I showed her the records. Tish looked at them for a long time. And then she did something that I want to be fair about, because it was not unreasonable: she said, "Gerald, honey, I love you, but these records could be wrong. Or there could be a divorce that just isn't in the online database. Or Hunter could have — I don't know — an annulment that hasn't propagated. You cannot go to Meredith's family with 'I pulled records on Hunter because he got drunk at a happy hour.' You cannot. Paige's mother will never speak to us again. And frankly, neither will Meredith."

Tish was right. She was right about the records possibly being incomplete. She was right about the social cost. So I did something I think was the better version of what I should have done. I called the county in Nevada where the marriage had been recorded. I got a very patient clerk named Dorothy on the phone. I explained what I was trying to verify. Dorothy, God bless her, walked me through their divorce docket. She said, in that careful way bureaucrats use when they are trying not to give you false hope, "Sir, I can tell you with certainty that no divorce has been filed on that marriage license in this county, in any adjacent county, or in this state."