Now she stood on her own wedding lawn looking at me and at three healthy, wanted, beautiful children, and she understood precisely who she had been about to marry — a man who kept another person’s hardship as a trophy.

“I’m not marrying you,” she said.

What followed was not dignified.

Serena’s mother wept; her father called for security to clear the lawn; Delphine shrieked at me that I had ruined their lives; the phones kept filming; Grayson shouted that no one made a life-altering decision in five minutes.

And in the middle of all of it, Juniper started to cry.

So I stopped attending to any of them.