I told myself I was tired and overwhelmed and manufacturing a problem out of a drunk woman and a soft-hearted son, that in the morning it would look small and I would be embarrassed to have felt it.

Brides are supposed to be generous on the first night.

Brides are supposed to bend.

I lay in the dark and rehearsed all the reasonable things, all the ways this was nothing, and underneath the reasonable things a quieter voice kept saying the same stubborn sentence over and over. Her eyes weren’t drunk.

And there had been other things that day, hadn’t there, small things I’d waved off in the rush and the joy of it.

Victoria had cried during the ceremony — which is what mothers do — but she had cried in a way that made a few of the guests shift in their seats, a low continuous grief that seemed pitched at a wedding it did not want to be happening.