There was worry in it, the ordinary fear of any parent whose child has just been hurt.

But underneath the worry there was something else, and it took me a moment to recognize it, because I had not often been on the receiving end of it: pride.

My father had spent my whole childhood trying to teach me one thing above all others, repeating it in a hundred different forms — that my worth was not up for negotiation, that no amount of anyone else’s approval was worth purchasing with my own self-respect, that a person who will not walk away from a bad deal has no power in any deal at all.

He had said it to me about business, about friends, about boys.

And he had spent years quietly worried, I think, that it hadn’t taken — that his agreeable, accommodating daughter had heard the words but not learned the spine.

And now here I was, fourteen hours married and already out, with my safety net intact and my head high and a lawyer already on the phone, having done the exact thing he had always hoped I would be able to do if I ever needed to.