My father measured a man by what he could take.

Ezekiel had spent his whole career measured by what he was willing to give, and to risk, for people who could never repay him.

The splinter my father had spent six months working into me — the small cold doubt about whether I was marrying beneath myself — was gone.

It had not been argued out of me; it had been made absurd, all at once, by a chapel full of people in uniform who had come, unasked, to stand witness for a man too modest to ever tell me what he’d done.

I had walked into that church half-carrying my father’s version of my own life.

I walked out of it carrying only my husband’s hand.