His way was erosion.

He introduced Ezekiel to his friends as “Verity’s little legal-aid project.” He asked, at dinner, in front of him, whether public defenders even made enough to cover a mortgage.

He offered, loudly and repeatedly, to “set us up properly” if I would only find someone more suitable, someone from the club, someone whose father he could golf with.

He was working on me, the way water works on stone, wearing down my certainty grain by grain, waiting for me to decide on my own that I was marrying beneath myself.

And the terrible thing, the thing I am ashamed of, is that it had partly worked — not enough to stop me, but enough that I had walked into my own wedding carrying a small cold splinter of doubt my father had put there, wondering, in the worst back corner of my mind, whether I was throwing away the life I was supposed to have on a man who would never be anybody.

That splinter was still in me when I stepped up to those doors in my dress.