Our family was not a rough draft awaiting completion.

It was not waiting for a wedding to become legitimate.

It was already whole — a father and a daughter and the memory of a mother, held together not by a marriage certificate but by the daily, deliberate act of choosing each other, again and again, which is the only thing that ever actually makes a family.

I had spent two years believing that marrying Pamela would give Hannah stability, would build us a real family at last, and that belief had nearly cost me the real family I already had.

A wife could have been a gift, with the right person.