My dress was hanging on the back of the closet door, ivory silk charmeuse, hand-fitted three times over four months, the kind of gown that makes you feel like your whole life has been leading to this exact moment. My best friend and maid of honor was laughing about something behind me, and the woman doing my hair kept saying, “Hold still. Just hold still.”
And I remember thinking, This is it.
This is the morning everything begins. I was twenty-nine years old. I had a corner office at a marketing firm in downtown Chicago.
I had a savings account I’d been building since I was twenty-two, when I graduated without a cent of debt because I’d worked two jobs through college and refused to borrow what I couldn’t pay back. I had an apartment I loved, a car I owned outright, and a five-year plan that I was eighteen months ahead of. I also had a fiancé named Marcus, who I had met at a rooftop fundraiser three years earlier and fallen for in the particular way that only happens when you’re old enough to know better and still choose to jump anyway.
What I didn’t have, sitting in that bridal suite at 7:15 in the morning, was any idea that the next four hours were going to be the most clarifying of my entire life. Marcus and I had been together for thirty-one months when he proposed. It wasn’t a surprise.
We had talked about it the way I talk about everything important, which is carefully, with both parties seated and coffee in hand. We discussed finances. We discussed living arrangements.
We discussed what marriage actually meant to each of us beyond the ceremony. I thought I knew who I was marrying. I thought I had been thorough.
I had not been thorough enough. His mother, I had always called her by her first name, Diane, at her own insistence, had been perfectly pleasant for most of our relationship. Warm, even.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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