The morning I married Noah Bennett, my mother told me I was making the most expensive mistake of my life.
She didn’t say it with tears.
She didn’t beg me to reconsider.
She stood in the middle of my childhood bedroom in a cream pantsuit that probably cost more than my wedding and looked at the secondhand dress hanging from the closet door.
Then she folded her arms.
“You’re thirty years old, Mia,” she said. “You’re old enough to understand that love does not pay a mortgage.”
I kept pinning my hair.
“I know.”
“Love does not cover health insurance.”
“I know.”
“Love does not rescue you when the transmission goes out, when someone gets sick, when a child needs braces, when life stops being romantic.”
I met her eyes in the mirror.
“I know, Mom.”
Her jaw tightened.
“And yet you’re still marrying him.”
I turned around.
“Yes.”
For a second, neither of us spoke.
Downstairs, I could hear my father pacing through the kitchen.
He hadn’t spoken to me all morning.
That was somehow worse than yelling.
Six months earlier, my parents had believed my future was settled.
They thought I would marry Blake Harrison.
Blake was thirty-six, polished, handsome, and wealthy enough to make people laugh before he finished a joke.
He owned half of a commercial development company outside Charlotte and had recently become a partner in the investment firm where my father worked.
My mother adored him.
My father respected him.
Blake sent flowers to my office for no reason, remembered which wine my mother liked, and somehow always managed to make my father feel important.
There was only one problem.
I didn’t love him.
I tried.
For almost a year, I tried.
Blake wasn’t cruel.
He wasn’t unfaithful.
He never raised his voice at me.
He was simply the kind of man who planned my life without realizing he was doing it.
He had already chosen the neighborhood where we would live.
He thought I should leave my job at the public library after we married because, according to him, “there’s no point in working for forty-two thousand a year when my accountant spends more than that on coffee.”
He joked about it.
Everyone laughed.
I didn’t.
