Every few months, Bisa Hall gets a phone call about a young man she met in college.

He was tall and handsome. He liked to party, and he could command a Florida A&M common room. He’d chosen a school a thousand miles from home on purpose but still called his mother. It was 1996, and the students fell in love in that early undergrad way when you’re trying to figure yourself and someone else out simultaneously.

When she was barely 21, Hall married him. By then, she said, their romantic flame had burned out. She needed Florida residency to continue her studies affordably, and marriage was the solution. They wore sweatpants to the courthouse. Despite being broken up, they stayed married on paper for more than three years, then divorced.

But marriage and divorce records stay public, and Hall d

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