“I mean it. Whatever you decide in this room, we’ll go with it. All of us. That’s it.”
My eyes prickle with tears.
“Do you love him?” Dad asks.
The question settles in the room.
“Yes,” I breathe.
And I do. I think.
That’s the complicated truth of it. There’s a version of Ezra I fell in love with, and I still reach for it even when it isn’t there.
“But?” Dad says.
He heard it. He always hears it.
Butis sitting right there on my tongue, the whole weight of it, and for a second, I can feel it wanting out. How I never feel like quite enough. How his family looks at me like I’m a problem they’re tolerating. How the wedding I’m getting married at today doesn’t have a single detail in it that I chose, not really, not freely, not without the quiet understanding that the other option was a conversation I didn’t want to have.
How I can’t remember the last time I said what I actually thought and feltsafeafter.
How sometimes I catch myself in a mirror and don’t recognize the woman looking back at me, and I think,Good, maybe she’ll do better than I have.
It’s right there, but I close my mouth around it.
Because if I say it, I can see exactly what happens next. I can see my father’s face, and I can picture the way my family—who love me fiercely, sometimes loudly, sometimes in ways that make everything more complicated—will carry that information.There’s a stubborn, unmoving part of me that’s not ready to let them hold it. I want to be the one to make this work. To prove something, even if I couldn’t tell you anymore what or to whom.
I press my lips together.
“Nothing,” I say. “Never mind.”
Dad looks at me for a long moment. “The morning your mother and I got married, I was sick in the church car park.”
I look at him.
“Twice,” he adds. “Your uncle held my jacket and told me I needed to have more respect for myself.” He smiles at the memory. “Your mother was twenty minutes late. I thought she wasn’t coming. Standing up there, sweating through my shirt, your grandmother was giving me a look from across the aisle as if she’d always suspected I wasn’t good enough. Then the doors opened.”
I watch the side of his face.
“She was… God.” He shakes his head. “I forgot every bit of it. All the nerves. Everything.”
I don’t want to tell him that I know the story is supposed to land on me like a promise, but instead, it lands like a question I don’t know how to answer.
“Do you know,” he says, changing course the way he does, “that you used to sing before you could talk properly?”
He always tells me this story.
“I’ve always been proud of you,” he says. “I want you to know that. The music, the career, the way you… all of it.”
“Dad—”
“I know we weren’t always easy.”
Before Mom found the right medication for her Bipolar, the right combination, and a doctor willing to listen, adjust, and try again, things were unpredictable. I understood early on that I needed to be the easy child, which meant keeping myself small and quiet just to maintain a steady atmosphere at home. Noahand Madison took on what they could handle. Rowan had her own pain that couldn’t be named, and everyone around her was always trying to figure out how to help.
There was never a good time to add to the pile.
I learned that early on, and it seems I never unlearned it.
