At our next wedding planning meeting, she slid a folder across the table toward me.
“These are some menu options,” she said carefully. “I thought… perhaps you’d like to choose.”
I almost laughed, because the previous months had been nothing but her choosing and me nodding.
David caught my eye, a small smile playing at his mouth.
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
My mother, meanwhile, acted as if nothing unusual had happened. She didn’t gloat. She didn’t weaponize her past.
That was the part that impressed David the most.
“She could destroy my mom with one sentence,” he whispered to me after Margaret left the room to take a phone call. “And she doesn’t.”
“That’s my mom,” I whispered back. “She’s not interested in winning. She’s interested in building.”
Elena Richie stayed in town for a week, partly to help with dress fittings, partly to enjoy the quiet of my parents’ modest home, which she described as “peaceful in a way Milan rarely is.”