“It may not be possible for me to love you the way you anticipate,” I said. It sounded more like a warning.

He laughed. “I completely understand. It’s chancy for any woman to think she could love me as a wife should, I’ll admit it, but if anyone can do it, you can. I really believe it. And I wasn’t kidding in there when I spoke to you alone. If not now, then surely soon, I’d be knocking on this door. You wouldn’t have gotten away, Corrine Dixon, not easily anyway.”

I smiled. Does this handsome man who lives like a prince really love me? Can I tell myself that dating other men and working my way back to him would have been a colossal waste of time?

“It’s such a nice night,” he said. “Why don’t we go for a short walk? Give them more time.” He held out his hand. “Mrs. Soon-to-be-I-hope Foxworth?”

I stood and took his hand. Was my father right? Did I still have choice, the choice of swimming faster in this current that was sweeping me quickly into my adult life? Or was I holding the hand of the man who had trapped me? Some women, my mother probably being one of them, believed love put a woman in a cage. She lost all her freedom, because love led to marriage, which was full of chains. The choices a woman had left as a wife were usually about things of little significance, yet even the dinner menu, the house furnishings, and her own clothes still had the heavy hand of her husband pressing her to go this way and that.

When women said they had “fallen in love,” I thought, they didn’t realize it, but they literally meant they had fallen into something out of which they would find it nearly impossible to escape.

I had taken away the one decision I believed I owned, or perhaps, as I had always feared might happen, I had suffered it being taken away from me: the decision about whom to marry. I realized, as we walked under the partially cloudy sky with its peekaboo stars, that I would have to either be extremely happy or learn how to believe the delusions.

“I wasn’t exaggerating in there to impress your mother,” Garland said. “I intend to make this wedding an event people will talk about for years. I will spare no expense. Queen Victoria would be jealous.”

I stopped walking. “This is not about a gala wedding, Garland. It’s about a gala life.”