You forgive a mother almost anything at a wedding.

But lying on that couch as the windows went from black to gray, I found myself gathering the day’s small strangenesses back up, one by one, and laying them beside the look she’d given Julian from the doorway, and they fit together into a picture I did not like and could not yet fully see.

I had watched Victoria all through the wedding — the way she stood a half-step too close to Julian in every photograph, the way her hand found his arm whenever another woman spoke to him, the way she’d said “my son” during her toast with a weight on the my that made a few people laugh nervously and then look away.

I’d filed all of it under difficult-mother-in-law, the ordinary kind, the kind you manage with patience.

But lying on that couch as the windows went from black to gray, I was no longer sure it was the ordinary kind.

I was beginning to think I had married into something I did not understand, and that the not-understanding was itself a kind of danger.