He had picked a side, instantly and instinctively, and the side he picked was his mother’s comfort and the room’s comfort and his own comfort, over the dignity of the woman he was about to make his mother-in-law.

A man’s instincts, in the unguarded half-second of a crisis, tell you what he actually values, before his careful words get a chance to dress it up.

Andrew’s instinct was to silence the objection, not the cruelty.

And Emily, feeling his fingers on her arm, understood at last that she had spent two years mistaking a man’s choices for a man’s limitations — and that a woman who marries a man hoping his weakness will someday improve is making a far safer bet than a woman who marries a man whose choices, when it counts, are simply not the ones she can live beside.

Chapter 4 — The Wine