I then did the thing I still cannot believe I did. I called Roxanne Wexler. I found her on LinkedIn. She worked at a logistics company in Phoenix. I called the company's main line. I asked for her. I was put through. I was connected to a woman who said, "This is Roxanne." And I said, "Ma'am, my name is Gerald. You don't know me. I'm calling because I believe you are still legally married to a man named Hunter Knightley, and he is about to marry someone in my extended family in three weeks."

There was a long silence on the phone. And then Roxanne said, in a voice that was flat and tired and not at all surprised: "Oh. Oh, Jesus. He did it again." She started crying. She told me, over the course of an hour — an hour during which I sat at my desk with the door closed and my heart pounding — that she had married Hunter fourteen months earlier, that he had disappeared from their apartment six weeks after the wedding, that she had assumed, because he had left a note, that a divorce was being filed, and that the note — she read it to me — had said he would "handle the paperwork." He had not handled the paperwork. He had just left.