At the engagement dinner, my future mother in aw s…

We could throw our own party later for my friends. I did not fight it. That is the part I keep going back to in my head.

I did not fight any of it because I kept telling myself it was just a dinner, just a meeting, just a phase. I was a woman who managed multimillion-dollar shipping contracts. I negotiated with men who tried to bully me twice a week, and I did not flinch.

But somehow, at the edge of my own engagement, I had started shrinking, and I had not even noticed I was doing it. The day of the dinner, I drove out to the foothills with my father in the passenger seat. He was seventy-two, a retired postal worker, a quiet man who had raised me and Hector mostly alone after our mother got sick.

He wore the gray suit he had bought for my college graduation. He held a small wrapped gift on his lap, a leather-bound journal he had picked out himself for Lawrence. He kept rubbing his thumb along the corner of the box, the way he did when he was nervous.

He looked over at me at a stoplight and asked if I was sure about this man. He had only