Chapter 5

The courthouse was a gray stone building downtown, a fifteen-minute drive from our house. I'd been there once before, years ago, to pick up a copy of our marriage license for a passport renewal. I hadn't thought much about it at the time.

Now I was standing in the same lobby, the smell of old paper and floor wax in my nostrils, a folder pressed under my arm, my father beside me.

"You want me to come with you?" he asked.

"No," I said. "I need to do this alone."

The clerk's window was at the end of a long counter. A woman in a blue blouse sat behind it, looking through a stack of files. I approached.

"Hi," I said. "I need to find out if a divorce was filed."

The clerk looked up. "Name?"

"Paul Marshall."

The clerk typed something into a computer. Then she looked at me, her expression strange.

"There's a file," she said. "But it's incomplete."

"Incomplete?" I said.

"It was opened three months ago," she said. "Petition filed. But it was never served. It's in the system as pending, not final."