You know like the classic hitman, criminal, or secret agent, etc. trying to present as a normal suburban family.

  • backalleycoyote@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    I was the secret.

    My brother and I were adopted at birth by an abusive, hyper-religious Christian family. Both of us walked away and never looked back when we were old enough. I knew they moved out of state not too long after my brother left but never bothered to follow-up.

    About 24yrs later I get a call from a young woman claiming to be my adopted sister. Turns out my parents moved to the Midwest, reinvented themselves as an older couple who’d never had kids and adopted a Korean girl through their church. She started to suspect in her teens that something wasn’t right because the two decades they raised my brother and I were full of gaps, stories they’d tell one time didn’t match the next time, but it wasn’t until she was a bit older she realized “holy shit, they completely covered up an entire family”. Also lied to her about the nature of her adoption (did that to my brother and I too) as well as learned nothing from their mistakes with us about how to care for a child. So now they have three kids that don’t talk to them and I have a sister that’s young enough to be my daughter that I never met until she was in college!

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 days ago

    Does it have to be just suspect?

    When one of my grandfathers died, there were two equally-sized groups of people at his funeral who had never met or heard about each other, and knew him by a different name.

    I wish there was much more to say about it. He wasn’t a spy; if he was hiding anything from the other group it was just that he was married and divorced.

  • Norin@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I started to suspect my Dad might have a secret second family when I was in high school.

    Maybe 10 years later, I learned that suspicion was correct.

      • Norin@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        He moved out of the family home to go to grad school across the country.

        When I went to go visit him (at the behest of my mom), he was incredibly careful about who I met and where we would go. It felt like there people he really didn’t want me to meet. During that trip I also overheard some bits of conversation while he was on the phone with… probably the mother of my secret half brother.

        When he finished his degree, he didn’t come home and never really gave a coherent explanation as to why. He’s always been a bastard though, so I didn’t much care to inquire as long as he stayed gone.

        Eventually I got a little older and got my first job. Suddenly he always needed money from me. I didn’t know it then, but I was paying part of his child support payments.

        As to how I found out, I ended up going to grad school at the same institution where the mother of my half brother was employed, and so he confessed to things before I found out by running into this person.

  • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I used to go to Germany several times a year for work, my wife joked that I must have another family there. Naturally, the child’s name was Klaus.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    The closest I came was the downstairs neighbor of an old girlfriend who was a paid hitman. He was a “former” gang member who did contracts on the side. It was all gang related stuff, nothing high profile, not like the movies. If you met the guy, you’d believe everything he said about this. Scared the fuck out of me, I slowly backed away from that situation.

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    My mom had a long distance truck driver boyfriend for a while. He’d be gone for three weeks, and home for two. We used to joke about him having a secret family or a gay lover.

    Haven’t heard anything about him in years, but I’m not ruling either scenario out.

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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      3 days ago

      I drove OTR a couple decades ago. I knew several drivers that had regular stops across the country. If he was hanging around for 2 weeks, and not just a few days waiting to catch up with his log, he’s probably not having another big thing going. Just the normal.