The life she called “less than”
Anna and I got married a few months later.
No ballroom. No legacy speeches. No performance.
Just string lights, folding chairs, and the kind of laughter you only hear from people who aren’t pretending.
We moved into a small rental with sticky drawers and a lemon tree in the backyard.
Aaron painted his room green and left handprints on the wall. I never scrubbed them out.
Anna worked nights.
I handled school pickup, lunches, dinner reheats, and Saturday morning cartoons.
We danced in the living room with socks on. We bought mismatched mugs at yard sales. We lived quietly — but we lived for real.
Three months in, we were standing in the cereal aisle when Aaron looked up at me and smiled.
“Can we get the marshmallow kind, Dad?”
