It was a house with two people in it, and a third who came on Sundays, and a dead woman who was still in it in every way that mattered, and it did not require an outsider to be ratified.

I would still like to marry somebody one day.

I want to say that, because the version of this where the widower nobly gives up on love is a story people enjoy and it is not mine.

But the terms are clearer now and I would state them out loud on a fourth date rather than discovering them at a wedding.

Canceling that ceremony was not brave and it did not feel like anything you could put in a story.

It felt like standing in front of sixty-one people I respected and saying something humiliating into a microphone.