But I agreed on my terms, and my terms were built around them and not around him: a slow, structured integration, overseen by a child psychologist, with no chance for Grayson to come storming in as the long-lost hero bearing gifts and then vanish again the first time it got boring or hard.

I had raised these three alone for seven years.

I was not going to hand their hearts to a man who had not yet proven he knew how to hold one.

I want to be clear that this was the single hardest discipline of the whole ordeal, harder than the wedding, harder than the years of poverty — because the easy thing, the thing half of me wanted, was to let Grayson in fast and let the children have a father at last.

They deserved one.