My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.

Then she asked me if I wanted her to call it off, and she meant it, and she would have.

I said no.

I have been asked since whether I should have said something different. I do not think so. She was twenty-four years old and she had thought about it for two years and she was right about the thing that mattered, which was that somebody was going to be paying for that woman at that wedding, and it was not going to be me again.