“Saturday?” I repeated, the word bitter as poison on my tongue as I stared at the man I had vowed to love for the rest of my life.

Austin looked back and forth between his father’s grim face and the tears running freely down my cheeks, growing more upset by the second.

“Dad told me you already talked about it and said it was okay, Mom, but you were just too tired from the twins to talk to me about it yet,” Austin admitted.

The room seemed to whirl around me as those horrible words rang through the kitchen and sickened me down to my soul.

“I never agreed to anything like that, Austin, and I would never in a million years tell anybody to send my boy away,” I swore to him, taking both of his shaking hands in mine.