By the time he proposed, I was already convinced he was the one.
It was a chilly October evening, right in the park where we’d had our first date. I noticed the fairy lights strung above the bench we always claimed, and before I could process what was happening, he was on one knee, holding out a ring with a smile that made my heart ache.
I said yes without hesitation.
I met his mother, Helen, three weeks later.
She was elegant, likely in her late 60s, with silver hair styled in perfect curls and a voice so smooth it almost sounded condescending. At first, she came across as warm and overly polite, calling me “dear” and offering backhanded compliments like, “You’re very poised for a working woman,” and “Peter’s always liked quiet girls, but you’re… interesting.”
She talked about how Peter had been her only child after a long, difficult pregnancy and how she had raised him mostly on her own while managing two part-time jobs.
Her voice softened when she described the time he broke his arm at age eight and refused to cry because she looked worried. For a moment, I saw not just a mother, but a woman who had built her world around her son.
There was something oddly intense in the way she looked at him. She would reach across the table to adjust his collar, cut his food without asking, or finish his sentences, often correcting the details he gave.
If he said, “We went to that lake when I was nine,” she would chime in, “No, darling, you were ten and it wasn’t a lake. It was a resort in Aspen.”
He’d just laugh. I tried to.
I wanted to believe it was just a close mother-son relationship.
I told myself she was lonely. I hadn’t grown up around strong maternal figures, so I wasn’t even sure what healthy looked like. Still, when she called him “my boy” with that proud smile, and he didn’t correct her, something in me tensed.
But love makes you blind, or at least, willfully ignorant.
After the wedding, the change was subtle, like a faucet leaking one slow drip at a time.
The man who used to surprise me with morning coffee started leaving his dirty mugs everywhere.
