Chapter 1: The Promise on the Bench
I was twenty-eight years old when I finally married the man who had been my entire world for as long as I could remember. Our wedding didn’t have the hallmarks of a society event; there were no sprawling ballrooms with crystal chandeliers, no sixty-piece orchestras, and certainly no extravagant floral arrangements imported from distant countries. We had rented a small, drafty community hall that smelled faintly of floor wax and old coffee. Our “orchestra” was a borrowed Bluetooth speaker, and our “extravagant” cake was a lopsided, three-tier vanilla creation baked by a former classmate who had more heart than culinary skill.
