Liam’s shoulders dropped with a relief so visible and so immediate that it should have stopped me cold. It should have made me set down the ribbon and the scissors and sit with the question that had been circling the edges of my consciousness for months: Why does my son relax when the man I’m about to marry leaves the house?

Instead, I told myself what I had been telling myself since the engagement—that change is hard, that children need time, that Owen provided stability, that he was a successful financial consultant who was paying off my student loans and would send the kids to private school, that this was the right thing to do, that security and love were close enough to the same thing that the difference didn’t matter.

“Okay,” Liam said quietly. “Goodnight.”

He shuffled back down the hallway to the room he shared with his five-year-old sister Sophie, and I watched him go with a prickle of unease that I brushed away the same way I had been brushing things away for six months—quickly, automatically, with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has decided that the narrative she is building is more important than the evidence accumulating against it.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside the scissors. FaceTime from Owen.

“Hey, handsome,” I said, picking up with a smile. “Missing me already?”

His face filled the screen—handsome, confident, lit by the glow of his car’s dashboard. “Hey, babe. Just checking on the table runners. Did you go with the oyster grey or the pearl white? My mom is freaking out that the white will clash with her dress.”