I’m thirty-five years old, and if someone had told the starry-eyed woman I was seven years ago that she would one day be writing this story, she would have laughed. Back then, I thought I had marriage all figured out. I thought I knew the man beside me as deeply as I knew my own heart. Dorian was charming, magnetic, and the kind of man who could shrink a crowded room until it felt like only the two of us existed.
I can still see him leaning against the doorway of our shoebox apartment with that crooked grin, making me laugh so hard I begged him to stop. We didn’t have much—just a thrift-store table, a shaky bed, and a golden retriever named Whiskey whose tail thumped against the floor like a drumbeat. But it was enough. “We’re going to build the most beautiful life,” he would whisper, kissing my hair. “You, me, and all the wonderful surprises ahead.”
The surprises came fast. Emma first—curious eyes wide open to the world. Marcus four years later, determined to convince us all that he was, in fact, a dinosaur. And then Finn, who treated sleep as nothing more than a suggestion, waking every twenty minutes as though the night owed him attention.
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