Thomas saw it.
He always saw it.
That was the part that hurt most.
He would squeeze my hand under the table and tell me afterward not to take Margaret personally.
He’d say she was traditional, that she needed time, that she had strong ideas about class and marriage and presentation.
Presentation was one of Thomas’s favorite words.
He applied it to dinner tables, careers, homes, wives.
By our first anniversary, I had realized that in his mind love and management were dangerously close cousins.
Still, I kept trying.
I told myself marriage had seasons.
I told myself pregnancy would soften him.
I told myself a man about to become a father would finally understand that tenderness was not weakness.
Instead, my pregnancy turned me into a more useful prop.
Thomas was a rising attorney at a prestigious firm, and that winter he was under final consideration for a court-appointed advisory role that would put him in front of judges, senior partners, and the kind of people who could make his career permanent.
