I told myself I was so used to looking for threats that I had started inventing them where there were none.

I told myself to let my mother be happy.

I have thought many times since about how much that particular silence cost us, and about how often, in stories like ours, the person who senses the danger first is the one who talks herself out of it.

It is a strange thing to have spent a decade trained to trust exactly the kind of instinct I overrode at that wedding.

In my old life, a feeling like that, a wordless sense that a picture was too clean, was not something you dismissed; it was data, and you acted on it, and the times you ignored it were the times things went wrong.