I turned it over and found it good.

It was, I thought, the right thing for a woman marrying a widower with a grieving daughter to believe, and I let it persuade me that Brenda was the person I could safely build a future around.

I have thought a great deal, since, about how a person can say the precisely correct sentence and mean none of it, and about how badly I wanted to believe it, and about how wanting to believe a thing is the surest way to stop checking whether it is true.

That is the trap I walked into with my eyes open, and I think it is worth naming plainly, because I do not believe I am the only widowed parent who has ever walked into it.