My brother had a good laugh at that. I might’ve, too. At the time, it had felt good to laugh at anyone else, so long as no one was laughing at me. Later on in life, I regretted how I’d treated my mother. She was the one, after all, who’d given me a whispered warning about Matt. “I don’t like how he puts you down, Angie,” she said softly in my ear at our engagement dinner. But her warning then had only hardened my heart against her.
