I wanted you to have your wedding without — ” he gestured at the aisle, the agents, the ruin of it — “without all of this.”

I could see, looking at him, exactly what he was afraid of, and it was not the fallout or the scandal or my father’s threats.

He was afraid of me.

He was afraid that in the next thirty seconds I would decide he had betrayed me — that he had chosen his case over my happiness, that he had let my wedding be destroyed, that a man who could take down my own father in the middle of my ceremony was a man I could never fully trust standing beside me.

I watched that terror sit in his eyes while he waited for my verdict, and I understood that this steady, formidable man, who had faced down billion-dollar corporations and death threats and attempts to end his career without flinching, was more frightened right now, at this altar, than he had ever been in a courtroom.

Because in a courtroom he could only lose a case.