Three months after we got engaged, I was standing on a rooftop in Midtown, a place Veronica loved but couldn’t book for her own engagement. It looked like a tight and trim Versailles garden, with paths between tidy shrubs surrounding the perimeter of a grassy center, all in twenty-five hundred square feet of Rockefeller Plaza. However, instead of a golden palace where a war was ended towering behind us, we got a hulking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, looming over me like an abusive boyfriend, lit from below as the sun went down to give the same air of menace I was feeling. Like the church was watching us, counting our sins one by one. An unbelievably apt and twisted mind-fuck that Veronica wasn’t clued in enough to know she’d planted.

Maybe that’s why my mother kept popping into my head that evening. I did not think about my parents—or my brothers or the farm—often. At first I was afraid that would be my downfall, that being here with these people would force out of me a longing for my old life—a life that was simple, but difficult in other ways. Money couldn’t buy us out of all our problems; instead my parents believed we could pray our way out of them. Pray for guidance, pray for a solution, pray for it all to go away.

That shit never worked for me.

“You need another?” one of the waitstaff asked, hovering beside me with a tray of empty glasses, a rainbow of lipstick stains scattered on the surfaces like an advertisement for Sephora. She couldn’t be older than eighteen and if she was, I needed to know her skincare routine. I was immediately jealous but not enough to ask. She smiled kindly. “I’ve been told to keep a special eye out for you and...him,” she said with a wink, as if I didn’t know I’d get special attention at my own fucking engagement party.

She nodded toward Graham, who stood near the entrance greeting Jim and Ellis, two friends from work. They all came up at BlackRock together. Though none of them are self-aware enough to discuss it, I’m sure they were also subconsciously drawn to each other as three men who only work in finance to please the whims of their overbearing and under-caring fathers.

Graham looked especially good today. He’d come home from work a few days before with a bag from Carson Street Clothiers and the excitement of a child anxious to tell me everything he just bought.