I did not want to be paired with the son of one of Dad’s business partners. I did not want a marriage arranged through country-club lunches or encouraged because two families held similar bank balances.

I wanted someone who would look at me and see Joselyn, not my father’s business, my inheritance, or the size of the house where I grew up.

I believed I found that person in Grantham Thorn. I met him when I was twenty-two at a coffee shop three blocks from my college apartment, on an ordinary rainy Tuesday.

He was nothing like the polished young men Mom occasionally seated beside me at charity luncheons. Grantham drove an old sedan with nearly two hundred thousand miles on it and worked long, unglamorous hours at a midsized architecture firm, drawing buildings he did not yet have the seniority to design himself.

His shirts were usually wrinkled by evening. His shoes were practical. His confidence did not seem to depend on whether anyone influential was watching.

During our first conversation, he made me laugh so hard I knocked over my drink and spilled it across both of us. Neither of us cared. We talked for four hours.

I missed a study session I’d promised to attend and didn’t remember until the next morning.

Dad stayed quietly skeptical of Grantham in the way fathers often distrust young men who arrive without a respected family name attached. Mom was more direct.

“A man marrying into money,” she told me once, “may eventually learn to tolerate the woman because he enjoys everything around her.”

I insisted she was mistaken. After knowing Grantham for only eight months, I stood in my parents’ kitchen and defended him with the absolute certainty available only to someone who has never yet paid the price of being wrong.

“You don’t understand what we have,” I said. At the time, I believed it.

Chapter 3 — The Court and Its Princess

We married in a small garden behind my grandmother’s former church. My parents financed the ceremony, but I kept it modest — white folding chairs beneath the dogwood trees, blue hydrangeas lining the aisle, and a reception in the church hall catered by a local company.