“That’s precisely what she’s saying,” he agreed. “And I want you to understand, before we go any further, that this is going to get uncomfortable before it gets resolved.”
“I don’t care about uncomfortable,” I said. “I care about the fact that Adeline planned this for weeks, told her own doctor exactly what she wanted to do, and proposed to me herself, in full sentences, holding my hand. That’s not the story of a woman who didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Then let’s prove it,” Mr. Whitcomb said. “Because right now, all Beatrice has is a theory. We have witnesses.”
The next several weeks turned into the strangest kind of grief I could have imagined — mourning my wife while simultaneously building a legal case to prove the marriage that made her my wife had actually been hers to choose.
We gathered statements from Dr. Iyer, the physician who’d overseen Adeline’s care for the better part of two years, who confirmed in writing that her cognitive function had been fully intact the week of the wedding, and that any pain medication she’d been on was carefully managed specifically to avoid impairing her judgment ahead of a major surgical decision she needed to be lucid enough to consent to separately.
Two of the nurses who’d stood in that hospital room during our four-minute ceremony gave statements describing, in detail, how clearly Adeline had spoken her vows, how she’d cracked a joke about the borrowed cardigan making her look like “somebody’s disappointed librarian aunt,” how she’d squeezed my hand and rolled her eyes at her own parents crying before the officiant had even finished the first line.
Mr. Whitcomb pulled the hospital’s own internal records showing the exact timeline — Adeline had requested the marriage license paperwork herself, called the officiant herself, and confirmed the date with hospital administration a full four days before the wedding, well outside any window that could be reasonably attributed to a sudden, medication-clouded impulse.
“She built her own paper trail,” Mr. Whitcomb said, almost admiringly, flipping through the file. “I don’t think your late wife left much of anything to chance, son.”
