“Seconds” by J. A. Dove

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I’m in love with a married man. That's not entirely accurate—his wife died fifteen months ago—but he is sealed to her, which means the marriage persists beyond death. So technically, eternally, he belongs to someone else. I have been turning this over in my mind for three blocks now, and my stomach has begun to register its objection.

I think about my great-great-great-grandmother Hazel. Wife number two. I don't know much about her. She’s a name in my family tree along with a black-and-white photograph of an old woman with pursed lips. I’m descended from the oldest of her two children. I don't know if she chose that life or surrendered to it, whether she walked into that marriage with her chin up or her eyes down. I have wanted to ask her since I started dating Alex.

"So, Sarah," Alex says. "What do you say we head back to my place?"

The night is cool and smells like October—wet leaves and woodsmoke. He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it, because that is easier than what I actually want to say, which is: I don't know yet. I'm still deciding. I am thirty-six years old, and I have not yet decided if this relationship is for me.

His place. I have been there twice. There are photographs on the walls of Alex and his late wife, Amanda, at the ocean with the three kids, all young enough that two of them are still in arms. She was pretty. Of course she was. She looks in those photographs like a woman who knew she was loved, which is either a quality of the person, the work of a talented photographer, or their marriage. I can’t tell which. What I can tell is that she looks certain. I have not felt certain about anything in a long time.

His kids are home with his mother tonight. She told me, the second time we met, that Alex needed someone. I know she meant it kindly, but I drove home afterward and sat in my parking garage for ten minutes before I could go inside, because being needed and being wanted are not the same thing, and I needed to grieve the difference in private.

This was not the life I planned. I want to be clear about that—not because I wanted something traditional, but because I expected something mine. I have a career I built from nothing and an apartment I chose because of the light in the kitchen. It’s a deliberately assembled life. What I want is a partner to walk it with me. What I have instead is a man who already has a house, a history, and a family. Everything that would be a first for me is a second for him.

I wonder if Hazel thought about her life in those terms. As wife number two, did the arithmetic of it bother her, or had she made some other kind of peace with it? She was probably younger than I am. Women then often were. She may not have had the luxury of deliberating. I have too much time, too much education, and too many nights alone to do anything but deliberate.

"You're quiet," Alex says.

"I'm just thinking."

"Good thoughts?"

I smile. "Mostly."

He believes me, or pretends to, which is its own kind of tenderness. This is what I didn't expect about him—not the widower part, the three kids, or the mother who materializes whenever he needs her—but how patient he is with my silences. He doesn't fill them. Alex waits. He has learned, I think, to wait.

That matters to me more than I want it to.

What I want to ask him, and what I have not been able to ask him in our two months together, is whether he is choosing me or choosing again, and whether those are the same thing. I want to know if he sees me or the shape of a life he already knows how to live. I wonder if Amanda would recognize herself in what he loves about me, and whether that would be a comfort or a verdict. I haven't asked because I'm afraid of the answer, and I don’t know if either one is something I can live with.

My married friends don't understand. They shrug when I bring it up—love is love, just be happy—which is easy to say when you are already sealed to someone who chose you first. My single friends won't go near it. Eternal polygamy, one of them said, making a face, like it was absurd and I wasn't already halfway in love and struggling to find solid ground.

Hazel had two children and no journals. Whatever she decided, she decided alone.

“So, my house?” he asks again.

"Yes," I say. "Let's go."

I take his hand properly this time and not just let him hold mine. We walk to his car, and he opens the door for me, which he always does, and I get in. The photographs will be on the walls when we arrive. His wife will be there, smiling from the ocean, certain in a way that I am not.

I press my fingers together in my lap and think of Hazel. I wonder if she smiled on the way to her wedding. I wonder if, by the time she arrived at her husband’s home, her smile had become real.

This piece was published in 2026 as part of the 15th Annual Mormon Lit Blitz by the Mormon Lit Lab. Sign up for our newsletter for future updates.