When I met Brandon, I’d already been doing the single-mom thing for four years.
My daughter, Lisa, was seven. Her biological father had disappeared before she turned three, and not in some dramatic, movie-style way with a slammed door and a screech of tires. He just became less available. Then he stopped answering calls. Then he stopped showing up at all, until one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time he had.
For a while I made excuses for him to Lisa. Daddy’s busy. Daddy’s working. Daddy loves you very much, he just can’t visit right now. But you can only make so many excuses for a man before you’re lying to your own child, and eventually I just stopped. I stopped giving Lisa explanations I couldn’t prove. She stopped asking. That was its own kind of heartbreak, watching a three-year-old quietly decide to stop hoping for someone.
So it was just us for four years. Me and Lisa against the world. And I had made my peace with that. I wasn’t looking for anyone. I had a kid to raise and a job to hold down and no room in my life for the particular chaos of dating.
Then Brandon came along.
He came into our lives carefully. That’s the word I always use for it. Carefully.
He never tried to force anything with Lisa. He didn’t show up on the third date and announce he was going to be her new daddy, the way some men do, like a kid is a prize that comes attached to the woman. He just… paid attention. He noticed things.
He fixed a Lego castle of hers that had lost a crucial piece, engineering a replacement out of spares so she wouldn’t notice the difference. He learned which cereal she liked, the specific one, and started keeping a box of it at his place before I’d ever said a word about us staying over.
One afternoon he sat on the living room floor for almost an hour, patient as a stone, because Lisa was learning to roller-skate and was terrified to let go of the couch. He didn’t rush her. He didn’t do that fake-cheerful adult thing of come on, you can do it! He just sat there, holding her hand, letting her hold onto the couch with the other one, until she was ready. She wasn’t ready that day. Or the next. He came back and sat on that floor as many times as it took.
A year later, he taught her to ride a bike.
She made him promise, absolutely promise, cross his heart, that he would not let go of the seat. And then she rode half a block down the sidewalk before she realized he’d let go about thirty feet back and had been running behind her the whole time, waving his arms.
“You said you weren’t letting go!” she shrieked, wobbling to a stop.
Brandon jogged up to her, out of breath, laughing. “And yet,” he said, “here you are. Still alive. Still upright. Funny how that worked out.”
She tried to stay mad. She really tried. She held onto it for about three whole seconds, arms crossed, glaring. Then she threw the bike down and launched herself at him and hugged him around the waist so hard he stumbled.
That was Brandon and Lisa. That was the whole thing, right there.
By the time he proposed to me, the two of them had their own inside jokes I wasn’t even part of. Their own routines. Their own arguments, real ones, about whose turn it was to pick the movie and whether pineapple belonged on pizza. He wasn’t playing at being a dad. He just was one, quietly, before anyone had made anything official.
He proposed at home, after dinner, because he knew I hated public attention and would have died if he’d done it in a restaurant with a violinist and everyone watching.
Lisa was supposed to be asleep. She was not asleep. She had apparently been crouched behind the hallway wall in her pajamas, because the second Brandon got down on one knee in our living room, I heard this enormous gasp from around the corner.
And then Lisa came tearing into the room in her nightgown, hair everywhere.
“Are you getting married? Are you? Are you getting married?“
Brandon, still down on one knee, still holding the little velvet box open, didn’t miss a beat.
“Well,” he said to her, completely serious, “that depends entirely on whether your mother says yes. So you might want to keep it down while she decides.”
I was laughing so hard I’d started to cry, both at once, and I could barely get the word out.
“Yes,” I told him. “Yes. Of course, yes.”
Lisa screamed. Actually screamed, this delighted shriek, and started jumping up and down.
And then, all at once, she stopped. Mid-jump, almost. Her whole face changed, went from wild joy to something small and careful and uncertain, and my heart clenched because I knew that look. It was the look she got when she wanted something so badly she was scared to say it out loud.
She looked at Brandon, and she asked, very quietly, “Does this mean I get a dad, too?”
I will never, as long as I live, forget the way Brandon’s face softened when she said it.
He set the ring box down on the coffee table. He opened his arms to her. And he said, “If you’ll have me.”
She threw herself into him so hard he rocked backward.
And I stood there in my own living room watching my daughter be caught and held by a man who chose her, actually chose her, and I thought my heart might just split right open from how full it was.
That question, does this mean I get a dad too, should have settled everything.
For Brandon’s mother, it did the exact opposite.
Barbara did not share our joy. Not one bit of it.
The thing about Barbara was that she was never openly cruel when there was an audience. That was almost the worst part, honestly. In front of other people she was perfectly pleasant. At family dinners she smiled and asked Lisa about school and second grade and whether she liked her teacher. She bought Lisa birthday presents, nice ones. She put Lisa’s name on the Christmas cards.
But get her alone, just the two of us, and all the poison came dripping out, one little drop at a time.
“Brandon has such a generous heart,” she told me once, in the kitchen, drying a dish while everyone else was in the other room. “Truly. Not every man would be willing to take on another man’s responsibilities.”
I set down the plate I was holding. “Lisa isn’t a responsibility Brandon got assigned, Barbara. She’s not a work project he inherited.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” She waved her towel. “I’m only saying. It’s a lot. To raise another man’s child. That’s all I mean.”
Another time, while Brandon was out on the patio grilling and couldn’t hear, she asked me, apropos of nothing, whether I expected Brandon to pay for Lisa’s college.
I actually laughed, because I thought she was making some kind of strange joke.
She was not making a joke. She was looking at me with these cool, expectant eyes, waiting for an answer.
“She’s seven, Barbara,” I said.
“I’m thinking long term.” She folded her napkin into a neat, precise square. “Brandon will have children of his own someday, you know. And there’s only so much to go around.”
Children of his own.
That phrase lodged itself in me like a splinter and stayed there. Children of his own. As if Lisa were a placeholder. As if the real children, the ones that counted, were still coming.
I didn’t know it then, but Barbara had no intention of waiting until the wedding to start deciding where Lisa belonged. And where she didn’t.
I told Brandon about some of it. Not all, because I didn’t want to be the girlfriend who was always complaining about his mother, but some. He’d sigh and rub the back of his neck and say she was old-fashioned. Overprotective. Set in her ways.
“She’ll come around,” he said. “Once we’re married, once things settle, she’ll adjust. She just needs time.”
I wanted so badly to believe him.
For most of the wedding planning, Barbara actually behaved herself, which I should have found more suspicious than I did.
She grumbled about the guest list being too big. She thought the flowers were outrageously expensive, and said so, more than once. But those were normal mother-of-the-groom complaints, the kind everybody’s family makes. She even offered, out of nowhere, to help with some of the decorations, and I was so relieved at the gesture that I said yes and thanked her and thought, maybe Brandon’s right. Maybe she’s coming around.
I think about that a lot now. How grateful I was. How I let her closer precisely because I wanted so badly to believe the worst was behind us.
The morning of the wedding, I was a mess of nerves and happiness.
We were getting married at a little bed-and-breakfast about forty minutes outside of town, this beautiful old place with a garden, and we’d booked rooms to stay a few nights afterward with Lisa. She’d been calling it our “family honeymoon” for weeks, so proud of the phrase, and had insisted on packing her own suitcase the night before. A little purple rolling one, her favorite.
“You’re not allowed to check it, Mommy,” she’d told me, very seriously, standing guard over the zipped-up bag.
“Okay, okay.” I put my hands up. “I surrender. But only if you swear you packed everything you need. Toothpaste. Underwear. The important stuff.”
“Everything,” she said solemnly. “I promise. I checked twice.”
I let it go. Of course I let it go. She was seven and proud of packing her own bag and who was I to ruin that.
That morning my gown hung in the bridal suite while my sister Megan did my hair, and there were photographers popping in and out, and bridesmaids everywhere, and my aunt was having a full crisis about her mascara clumping. Pure chaos, the good kind.
Barbara came in and out several times. Helping, supposedly. At one point she disappeared for a good twenty minutes, and I honestly didn’t even register it in all the commotion. Why would I? She was the mother of the groom. She was allowed to wander off.
By the time I actually stepped into my dress, I was so overwhelmed and running so behind that I didn’t inspect it. The train was long, easily six feet, and pooled out behind me, and I couldn’t see the back of it anyway without contorting myself in front of the mirror. So I didn’t look.
And then Barbara, of all people, became incredibly, suddenly helpful.
“Here, let me carry your train,” she said, gathering the long fall of fabric up over her arms as we moved toward the doors. “You don’t want it dragging through the dust.”
“Thank you,” I said, genuinely touched. “That’s so kind.”
“Of course, dear.”
And right before the doors opened for me to walk in, she crouched down behind me, out of my sight.
“Let me just arrange this properly,” she murmured. I heard the fabric shifting and settling. “There we are.”
I glanced back over my shoulder at her. “Is it good?”
She looked up at me and she smiled, and I swear to you it was a warm smile, a real one, or what I took for one.
“Perfect,” she said.
I would not understand what Barbara had actually just done to me until I was halfway down that aisle.
The music started.
The doors opened.
And at first, all I could see was Brandon.
He was standing up at the front in his gray suit with tears already glistening in his eyes, looking at me like I was the only thing in the entire world, and my whole chest went warm and full and I started walking toward him.
But then I noticed something strange. People weren’t looking at my face. They were looking behind me. At the floor behind me, at the train. A few of them pointed. There was a whisper, and then another, and it moved through the rows of seated guests like a breeze moving through grass.
I thought, at first, that maybe something had snagged. That I’d caught a leaf or a bit of decoration on the hem and was dragging it. I kept walking, but my smile started to feel uncertain.
By the time I was halfway down the aisle, people weren’t whispering anymore. They were openly staring. Some had their hands over their mouths.
And up at the front, I watched Brandon’s smile slowly fall off his face as he looked past me, at whatever everyone was looking at.
Lisa was standing near the front in her pale blue flower-girl dress, her little basket of petals forgotten in her hand. As I got closer, she leaned sideways to see behind me, and her face scrunched up in pure confusion.
Then she said, loud enough for the front rows to hear, in that clear carrying voice children have:
“Mom… why does that suitcase have my name on it?”
I stopped walking.
“What?” I said. “What suitcase, baby?”
Lisa pointed behind me. I turned as far as the dress would let me, twisting at the waist, trying to see.
Megan was already moving. She rushed up from her spot as maid of honor and bent down and lifted a section of my train up off the floor so I could see it.
And for a second, my brain simply refused to understand what my eyes were showing me.
Sewn all over the train of my wedding dress, all along its length, were little fabric suitcases. Tiny ones, cut and stitched from scraps of cloth, made to look like luggage. I counted them later. There were eight. Eight little suitcases stitched across the white fabric.
And the largest one, sewn right at the very end of the train, at the part that dragged furthest behind me, had a little paper tag hanging off its handle.
The tag said, in neat handwriting:
LISA.
For several seconds I genuinely could not breathe. The whole room seemed to go silent and far away.
Then I lifted my head and I found Barbara in the crowd.
“What did you do?” I said.
She was standing near the front row, perfectly composed, her hands folded in front of her, and she was not the least bit ashamed. If anything, she looked satisfied.
“I simply made the dress honest,” she said.
Somebody in the crowd whispered, “Oh my God.”
Barbara went on, lifting her voice a little so it would carry, so everyone could hear her clever little speech.
“My son isn’t just getting a wife today, is he? So now everyone can see it plainly. All the baggage you’re dragging into this marriage. All the baggage my boy is going to have to carry.”
And beside me, I heard Lisa make a sound.
A small sound. A tiny, broken little sound.
I turned to her, and her face had crumpled up, her chin trembling, her eyes filling.
“Mom,” she said. “Am I baggage?”
Everything inside me went white-hot.
I dropped to a crouch right there in my wedding dress, in front of everyone, and I grabbed both of Lisa’s hands in mine.
“No,” I said. “No, sweetheart. Absolutely not. You listen to me. You are not baggage. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. Do you hear me? The very best thing.”
She nodded, but the tears were spilling over now, and I could see she didn’t believe me, not all the way, because a grown-up she was supposed to trust had just told a whole room full of people the opposite.
I stood back up, and I turned to Brandon.
He was staring at the little suitcases on my train. Just staring at them. And then he lifted his eyes and he looked at his mother, and I saw an expression come across his face that I had never once seen in all the years I’d known him. Not anger, exactly. Something colder and quieter and much more final than anger. I didn’t know what it meant. It scared me a little.
Brandon turned to the pastor.
“Please,” he said, his voice very level. “Give me five minutes.”
And then he turned and walked away from the altar. Straight back down the aisle, past all the staring guests, and out the main doors of the room.
I stood there at the front, alone, in my ruined dress, watching the doors swing shut behind him.
My first thought was that he just needed air. That the shock of it had knocked the wind out of him and he needed a moment to collect himself.
My second thought was much darker, and I hated myself for it even as it formed.
What if Barbara finally got to him?
What if this was the thing that did it? What if, faced with the public humiliation, faced with the reality of the baggage his mother kept talking about, some part of him was out there right now reconsidering? Brandon had spent years proving he loved my daughter. But I knew, too, that humiliation does strange things to people, that shame can crack open doors you thought were bolted shut, and for one terrible minute I let myself believe that Barbara might have won.
And Barbara, God, Barbara looked pleased. She took one slow, satisfied breath and smoothed the front of her jacket, like a woman whose plan was coming together exactly as designed.
Five minutes crawled by. The longest five minutes of my life.
Then the doors opened again.
And Brandon walked back in carrying Lisa’s little purple overnight suitcase.
My heart just stopped dead in my chest.
Lisa saw it and her eyes went wide. “That’s mine,” she said softly. “That’s my suitcase.”
Barbara saw it too. And that satisfied little smirk of hers stretched into a wide, triumphant grin. She thought she’d won. She actually thought her son had gone to fetch the child’s bags to send her away.
“Well,” Barbara said, warm as anything. “I’m so glad you’ve finally come to your senses, Brandon.”
Brandon didn’t answer her. He didn’t even look at her.
He walked down the aisle, all the way to the front, and he set Lisa’s little purple suitcase down on the floor right in front of her. And then he knelt down and reached for the zipper.
And Barbara’s grin vanished.
“Brandon,” she said.
He started to unzip it.
“Brandon, don’t.” Her voice had changed completely. “Don’t open that here.”
And I remembered, in a rush, Lisa standing guard over this exact suitcase the night before. You’re not allowed to check it, Mommy. And I looked at Barbara’s face, which had gone pale and frightened, and I thought, for the first time, what on earth is in that bag.
“There’s something you all need to see,” Brandon said, quiet but clear, so the whole room could hear it. “Before anyone says another word. Especially you, Mom.”
And he pulled the zipper the rest of the way open.
Inside was exactly what you’d expect a seven-year-old to pack. Pajamas, folded messily. A stuffed rabbit with one ear worn soft. Two little shirts. A ball of mismatched socks. A pair of glittery sandals she’d been dying to wear all summer.
Brandon moved the clothes gently aside.
And underneath, at the bottom, was a handmade picture frame.
Bright blue cardboard. Gold glitter shedding all over everything. Plastic craft jewels glued on unevenly around the border, some of them already peeling off. The kind of thing a kid makes at the kitchen table over the course of a whole careful afternoon.
Set into the middle of the frame was a photograph of Brandon and Lisa at one of her soccer games, both of them grinning, his arm around her shoulders.
And across the top, in crooked cut-out craft letters, it said:
MY NEW DAD & ME.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“It was supposed to be your wedding present,” Lisa whispered, staring at the floor. “I made it for you. It was supposed to be a surprise for after.”
Brandon lifted it out of the suitcase, so carefully, like it was made of glass instead of cardboard.
“It’s perfect,” he said, his voice thick. “It’s the best present anyone’s ever given me.” Then he looked at it a moment longer, and something crossed his face. “But sweetheart. Where’s the drawing?”
Lisa went completely still. “Dad Brandon, no,” she said. “Don’t.”
Because he’d already lifted a folded sheet of construction paper out from underneath where the frame had been. Her words made his hand freeze in midair.
“What is it, Lisa?” he asked gently.
She stared at the folded paper in his hand, and her eyes flooded with tears, and her whole body seemed to shrink.
“Gran—” she started, then stopped and corrected herself, and the correction was the worst part. “Barbara. She told me to throw it away. She said it was wrong and I had to throw it in the trash.”
Brandon went very still. “You showed this to her already? When?”
“This morning.” Lisa’s voice was barely a whisper. “I showed her because I was proud of it. And she got mad.”
Brandon looked up at his mother. Just for a second. Then he unfolded the paper.
It was a child’s drawing. Four stick figures standing in a crooked, hand-holding row, the way kids draw families. Underneath each one, Lisa had written a label in careful purple marker.
MOM. DAD. ME. GRANDMA.
Except the word GRANDMA had been crossed out. Hard. Two heavy, angry lines slashed through it in blue ballpoint pen, the pen pressed down so firmly it had almost torn the paper. And beside the crossed-out word, in a cramped adult hand, someone had written a single word.
NO.
Brandon stared at that drawing for a very long time. The whole room was dead silent. Then he stood up, slowly, and held the drawing up in the air so Barbara could see it.
“Did you do this?” he asked.
Barbara lifted her chin. She didn’t even try to deny it. “Yes,” she said. “I corrected it. Because it isn’t true. I am not that child’s grandmother, and I never will be.”
Brandon straightened. He turned back to Lisa, kneeling again to be level with her.
“Lisa,” he said. “Is this why you asked me that question the other day? About the baby?”
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Because three days earlier, out of absolutely nowhere, Lisa had come to Brandon looking worried and asked him whether he would still love her after we had a baby of our own someday. He’d told me about it that night, both of us baffled, because we hadn’t been talking about babies, we hadn’t said one word about it around her. We couldn’t figure out where the question had come from. And when we’d gently asked Lisa why she was worried about it, she’d clammed up and refused to say.
Now, kneeling on the floor in her flower-girl dress, she nodded.
“Barbara said,” Lisa hiccupped, “she said only your real children would be her grandchildren. She said those are the ones that matter. The real ones.”
The whole room seemed to inhale at once.
“You said what?” Brandon rose to his feet and rounded on his mother.
Barbara crossed her arms. She actually crossed her arms, defiant, in front of a hundred and fifty people, in front of a crying seven-year-old.
“She’s being dramatic,” Barbara said. “I told her the truth, that’s all. Brandon, you will have children of your own one day. Your own flesh and blood. Those children will be my grandchildren, because they’ll carry your blood. There’s a difference, and she’s old enough to understand it.”
Brandon looked down at the drawing in his hand. The crossed-out GRANDMA. The angry NO. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the eight little suitcases sewn across my train.
“You humiliated my fiancée,” he said, slow and steady, “and you humiliated a seven-year-old child, in front of every single person I love. You planned it. You sat down with a needle and thread and you planned it.”
“I was trying to stop you,” Barbara said, “from making a decision without understanding the consequences.”
“What consequences?”
Barbara flung a hand out toward Lisa, who flinched back from it.
“This,” she said.
And something in Brandon’s face settled. That was the exact moment, I think, that this stopped being about a ruined wedding dress and became about something much bigger and much more permanent.
He handed me the frame and the drawing to hold. Then he crouched down again in front of Lisa, right down on the floor in his good suit, and took both her hands.
“Lisa,” he said softly. “Do you remember what you asked me? The night I proposed to your mom?”
She nodded, sniffling. “I asked… I asked if I got a dad, too.”
“And what did I say?”
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You said… ‘if you’ll have me.’”
“That’s exactly right.” He reached up and wiped a tear off her cheek with his thumb. “And I want you to hear me, okay? My answer hasn’t changed. It’s not going to change. Not today, not ever. Not because of a suitcase, not because of a drawing, not because of anything anybody says.”
Lisa threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder, and he stood up, lifting her right off the ground, and held her there.
Then he looked over her head at his mother.
“Lisa is my daughter,” he said.
Barbara shook her head. “Brandon, be reasonable—”
“She is my daughter.” His voice cracked like a whip across the room, and it was the first time he’d raised it. “In every single way that matters. And if Emily and I have more children someday, Lisa does not become one bit less my child so that somebody else can decide to become more of a grandmother. That is not how it works. That’s not how any of it works.”
I stepped up beside him then, my ruined train dragging its little suitcases across the floor, and I looked Barbara dead in the eye.
“Anyone who can’t accept that,” I said, “isn’t welcome in our family. Anyone.”
Barbara stared at me, and then at her son, and I watched something in her curdle.
“Are you going to let her speak to me like that?” she said to Brandon. “I’m your mother.“
“She speaks for both of us,” Brandon said. He didn’t hesitate for even a second. “So this is the only question that’s left, Mom. Do you want to be part of this family? All of it? Or not?”
Barbara looked around the room. She actually turned and scanned the faces of the guests, waiting for someone, anyone, to leap to her defense. Her own sister was staring hard at the floor. One of Brandon’s cousins slowly shook his head at her. Even the pastor, who had surely seen a lot of things at a lot of weddings, looked frankly stunned.
Nobody said a word for her. Not one person.
Barbara’s face went hard and tight. She snatched her purse up off the chair, turned, and walked out. Her heels clicked all the way down the aisle and out the doors, and they closed behind her with a soft final thud.
For a few seconds, nobody in the whole room moved. We all just stood there in the wreckage of it.
Then Lisa lifted her head off Brandon’s shoulder, sniffed hard, and said, in a small hopeful voice:
“Are you still getting married?”
And a few people actually laughed, this surprised, grateful, releasing laugh, because leave it to a seven-year-old to ask the only question that actually mattered.
Brandon looked at me over the top of her head, still holding her.
“Are we?” he said.
I looked down at my train. At the eight little fabric suitcases still stitched into it, and the big one at the end with my daughter’s name hanging off it like a cruel joke.
Lisa followed my gaze. She wriggled down out of Brandon’s arms, walked over, and pointed at the suitcase with her name on it.
“Mom,” she said. “Can you take my name off? I don’t want to be a suitcase.”
My throat closed up so tight I couldn’t answer for a second.
And then Megan was there beside me, my sister, appearing out of nowhere the way she always did when I needed her, holding up a tiny pair of embroidery scissors she must have grabbed from somewhere.
I looked at all eight of them. That woman’s careful, poisonous handiwork.
“Cut them all off,” I said. “Every last one.”
So my sister knelt down in front of me, and two of my bridesmaids knelt down too, and right there at the front of the room, with the whole wedding watching, they cut every single one of those little suitcases loose from my dress. One by one. The threads snapping. The little fabric bags dropping to the floor. And Lisa’s most of all, that big one with her name on it, which Megan cut free and handed to me, and I balled up in my fist.
And then, somehow, after one of the ugliest, most humiliating moments of my entire life, we got married.
Lisa stood right up front between us the whole time, not a flower girl off to the side anymore but standing between her mom and her dad where she belonged, and when Brandon said his vows he looked at both of us when he said them. Both of us.
At the reception, we didn’t put out the fancy engagement photo everyone expected on the table by the cake.
We put out Lisa’s picture frame. The blue cardboard one, shedding gold glitter, plastic jewels peeling off the edges.
MY NEW DAD & ME.
It sat right there next to our wedding cake all night long, and it was the most beautiful thing in the room, and I dare anyone to tell me it wasn’t.
That night, after everyone had finally gone home and the last car had crunched away down the gravel drive, the three of us went upstairs to our room at the bed-and-breakfast.
Lisa marched in, changed into her pajamas, and climbed right up into the exact middle of the big bed and settled in like she owned it.
Brandon sat down and started taking off his shoes. “You know,” he said, “this is supposed to be your mom and my wedding night.”
“I know,” Lisa said, not moving one inch. “Correct.”
“Correct,” Brandon agreed, hiding a smile.
“Don’t married people want privacy?” Lisa asked, with the air of someone quoting a fact she’d learned somewhere.
I nearly choked on nothing.
Brandon looked at her, then very slowly turned and looked at me. “And who,” he said, “have you been talking to?”
Lisa considered whether to give up her source. “…Aunt Megan,” she admitted.
“I am going to be having a conversation with Aunt Megan,” Brandon said gravely, and Lisa giggled, the first real laugh out of her in hours, and something in my chest finally, finally unclenched.
We didn’t make her go to her own room. Of course we didn’t. Not that night. She snuggled down between the two of us, and within a few minutes she was fast asleep, one hand flung across Brandon’s chest, her mouth open, snoring the tiny snore she’s had since she was a baby.
On the little table beside the bed sat the picture frame she’d made. MY NEW DAD & ME, catching the last of the lamplight in its glitter.
And somewhere downstairs, out in a trash can behind the kitchen, lay eight little fabric suitcases that a bitter woman had sewn to try to tell my daughter she didn’t belong.
But Lisa wasn’t in that trash can. Lisa was right here, in the middle of the bed, in the middle of us, exactly where she’d always belonged. She was never the baggage.
She was the whole reason any of us were here at all.