My daughter had not been uncomplicatedly excited to attend her father’s wedding.

She had been planning something.

For months, probably, while I was drowning in my own grief and failing to see it, my little girl had been watching, and gathering, and preparing, and waiting — carrying a burden that belonged to the adults in her life, because every one of those adults, myself included, had been too broken or too cowardly to carry it for her.

I was not driving toward a triumph.