Then I went back to the front of the binder and read the 2019 Delaware certificate again, and the date on it, and I thought about those six long months before the wedding, when Gregory Palmer had asked me questions at the kitchen island with his reading glasses pushed up on top of his head.

How long I’d been in the JAG Corps.

Whether I’d ever been called as a witness.

Whether my record was clean.

I had thought he was just being a father.

“Clean record,” I said out loud to the empty kitchen.

He never wanted a daughter-in-law.

He wanted a name without a mark on it, a military prosecutor’s signature, an officer nobody would ever dream of questioning.