and only one night learning how to choose me.
I thought that was the end of the secret.
I thought my father-in-law had only wanted to bring his late wife’s memory into our marriage.
But the next morning, when I walked into the kitchen and saw what was waiting on the table beside Lily’s old photo…
I realized there was another reason he had come into our room that night.
A reason nobody had told me.
And it had nothing to do with tradition.
The confident smile he had worn earlier disappeared.
My father-in-law lowered his eyes and slowly placed the kitten on the bed.
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
That sentence.
Those exact words.
They were the words people said when things were exactly what they looked like.
I stepped away from the bed and wrapped the blanket around myself.
“My wedding night,” I said slowly, “my husband brings his father into our room, tells me I have to accept some strange tradition, and now there’s a kitten crawling on my back at three in the morning.”
