Member-only story
NONFICTION
I Hate Him But I’ll Take His Name
I’ll do it for love
His name stared back at me from the screen. My heart sank. I opened another tab and began typing into the search engine. It only needed two letters before predicting the rest of the phrase — I’d typed it many times.
I looked down the list of websites, my eyes pausing briefly on each one. I’d previously clicked on them all. Nausea flirted with my stomach as I debated whether to read through each website again. I sighed and closed the laptop. Not today, I can’t today.
The email arrived from my local council informing me that my daughter had been offered a place at my first-choice elementary school in September. The email contained information that would be passed along to the school, most importantly, her name.
Her name alongside his name.
When I married my ex-husband, I didn’t change my last name because my attorney advised me not to. I was in the middle of an application with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and to avoid confusion, she believed it would be easier to wait until my application was accepted. Thanks to the pandemic, my application sat in a queue for years.
In the meantime, I had my daughter and proceeded to make one of the worst decisions in my life…