“Did you tell her she would no longer be the most important girl in my life?” And Pamela’s composure broke.

“You cannot expect your wife to accept second place forever, Christopher,” she blurted.

Several guests lowered their eyes.

Others gasped.

I took the wedding band I had carried for her out of my jacket pocket and set it, quietly, on the table beside the microphone.

“I will not marry anybody who views my daughter as a rival to be removed,” I said.

It was, I think, the most important sentence I have ever spoken in public — not because it was eloquent, but because my daughter was standing beside me to hear her father say it, out loud, in front of everyone who mattered to us, at the exact moment she most needed to know it was true.