Of course, it would be even worse if Luke survived, because I’d be a real bitch if I abandoned my legless fiancé. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than spending every day of my life with a physical reminder of the terrible things life can do, of the ever-present reality that no one is safe. Luke, beautiful Luke, with his friends and family who were so good at being normal, the way a restaurant quieted a little as we walked to our table, his hand on the small of my back . . . it had dulled the dread in the beginning. Luke was so perfect, he made me fearless. Because how could anything bad happen around a person like that?

Right after we got engaged—Luke on his knee when we crossed the line of the New York City Marathon, running to raise money for leukemia, which his father had beaten ten years ago—we took a trip to DC to visit his pocket of Hamilton friends stationed there. Most of them I had met at various weddings over the years. But there was one I hadn’t, Chris Bailey. Bailey they called him—a wiry guy, snaggletoothed, limp hair parted down the middle. He didn’t look like the other Aryan gods in Luke’s posse. I met him at the bar we went to after dinner—he hadn’t been invited to dinner.

“Bailey, get me a drink,” Luke said, a little bossy, but playful too.

“Whadya want?” Bailey asked.

“The fuck does this look like?” Luke pointed to his Bud Light, the label wrinkly with perspiration.

“Whoa.” I laughed. A real laugh, at first. It was all in good fun. “Easy.” I put my hand—the one weighed down by the emerald—on Luke’s shoulder. He strapped his arms around my waist and pulled me into him. “I love you so fucking much,” he said into my hair.

“Here you go, man.” Bailey handed Luke a beer. Luke stared at it, threateningly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Where’s my fiancée’s drink?” Luke demanded.

“Sorry, man!” Bailey smiled, his snaggletooth catching on his lower lip. “I didn’t know she wanted anything.” To me, “Whadya want, my dear?”

I did need a drink, but not from Bailey, not like this. Luke always messed around with his buddies—really, these guys were tan ex-athletes, healthy and jokey, the very definition of a buddy. But there was an inequality in this exchange with Bailey that I’d never seen before. Bailey had the look of a kid brother, desperate to fit in, desperate to please, willing to take whatever abuse necessary. It was something I recognized all too well.

“Bailey, please excuse my asshole fiancé.” I looked at Luke, a cutesy, pleading look. Come on, tone it down.

But on it went for the rest of the night—Luke barking orders at Bailey, cutting him down for carrying them out wrong, my horror swelling the drunker and meaner Luke got. I was picturing Luke in college, tormenting this hanger-on, maybe even taking advantage of a girl passed out on the lumpy fraternity couch. Luke knew it was rape if she wasn’t coherent enough to say yes, right? Or did he think it counted only if the boogeyman jumped out of the bushes and ravaged some sober, unassuming freshman on her way to the library? Oh my God. Who was I marrying?

Luke demanded Bailey drive us home, even though Bailey was drunk, even though we were in a bustling area of DC with plenty of cabs. Bailey was happy to do it, but I refused to get in the car. Caused quite the to-do on the street screaming at Luke to go fuck himself.

Later, back at the hotel room, tears in his eyes, all traces of the snarling bully he’d been for the last few hours gone, Luke said, “Do you know how much it kills me when you tell me to fuck off? I would never speak that way to you.”

I raged, “When you treat someone the way you treated Bailey, it’s your own way of telling me to go fuck myself!” Luke gave me the look he always gives me when he thinks I’m being ridiculous. Like I need to get over high school already.

Even though that incident seemed out of character for Luke, even though he woke up the next morning and “felt sick” over how he’d behaved the night before, it was that weekend that I stopped seeing Luke as so perfect and pure. Stopped thinking nothing bad could happen to me while I was with him. Now I was scared all the time again.

I popped a lobster-mac-and-cheese bite into my mouth; it was my third. I’d finally settled on a caterer, the one Mom suggested after reading that she was a Kennedy favorite. Sometimes even she knew the right buttons to push.

I almost waited until just a few days before the tasting to invite my parents. This way it would have been too late and too expensive to make arrangements to get up to Nantucket. There are three ways to get here—a direct JetBlue flight from JFK, which is almost never less than five hundred dollars; a JetBlue flight to Boston followed by a forty-five-minute flight in a plane similar in size to the one JFK Jr. crashed into the Atlantic; or a six-hour drive to Hyannis Port (eight for my parents in PA), where you could take an hour-long ferry ride or a small plane to your final destination. But I knew if I waited, Mom would find a way to come, and the thought of her driving her rickety old BMW all the way to Hyannis by herself, having to figure out which ferry to get on and where to park and hauling her fake Louis Vuitton bags on board, was so sad I couldn’t stand it.

Dad had no interest in coming, which was no great surprise. He hadn’t had an interest in my life, in any life, his own included, ever since I could remember. For a time I wondered if he was cheating on Mom, if he could be the type who had a secret family on the side, his real family, whom he actually loved. One time, when I was in high school, he told Mom he was going to get the car washed. About half an hour after he left I called out to Mom that I was making a run to CVS. Halfway there, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. I had to turn around in an empty lot, circling the crudely flattened land, the thick forest pulverized to make room for a brand-new housing development, and I discovered Dad, sitting behind the wheel of his car, just staring at the sticky mud. I backed out quick, before he could notice me, and gunned it back home, my heart racing with what I’d just seen, my mind trying to make sense of it. Eventually I realized, there was nothing to make sense of. Dad was ambivalent, simple as that. There was no second family he loved more than us. He might not have loved anyone.

Luke generously offered to pay for Mom’s JetBlue ticket—it was no trouble, really, especially since it was just her—and Mom drove into the city on Friday, using our guest pass to park her car in our garage.

“Will it really be safe here?” She fretted with her keys and pressed lock, the car chirping in response.

“Yes, Mom,” I groaned. “This is where we keep our car.”

Mom ran her tongue over her glossy lips, unconvinced.

I give the Harrisons credit for the patience they have with my mother, for her idiotic attempts to impress them. I’m not that great, I want to tell them. Why do you put up with her?

“Thank you for the tip,” Mr. Harrison had said just that morning, when Mom told him that he should really keep an eye on his portfolio because interest rates are going up. Mr. Harrison was the president of Bear Stearns for nine years before he retired; how that man didn’t tell Mom which way was up I have no idea.

“Anytime.” Mom beamed, and I widened my eyes at Luke, standing behind her. He made the universal relax gesture, pressing his palms down, as though he was trying to shut the full trunk of a car.

We settled on the lobster-mac-and-cheese bites, the mini lobster rolls, the wasabi steak tips, the tuna tartare spoons, the Gruyère bruschetta (“The ‘ch’ in bruschetta is actually pronounced like a ‘k,’” Mom said knowledgeably, even though I was the one who taught her that after I studied abroad in Rome my junior year), the oyster bar, the sushi bar, and the antipasto bar. “That’s for my husband’s side of the family!” Mom joked. Italians who don’t even know how to pronounce “bruschetta.” We are the worst kind.