My Father Humiliated Me at My Sister's Wedding and Shoved Me Into the Fountain. He Had No Idea the Man Walking Through the Hotel Doors Was My Husband.

"Husband," my father repeated, the word landing strangely in his mouth. "Evelyn doesn't have a husband."

"For eighteen months, I have," Rhys said. "Which, given what I just watched happen to my wife's dress and my wife's dignity in the same thirty seconds, is a fact I'm now regretting not making a great deal louder a great deal sooner."

My mother appeared at Victor's elbow, her carefully composed face beginning to crack at the edges. "Evelyn, is this — is he serious?"

"We got married eighteen months ago," I said, and I found, to my own surprise, that my voice came out steady, even warm, the way you'd deliver good news rather than a confession. "Courthouse. Two witnesses. I didn't tell any of you because I knew exactly what would happen to it if I did."

"What would have happened?" Victor demanded, some of his old bluster clawing its way back now that he had an argument to fight instead of a stranger to place.

"This," I said, gesturing, with my still-damp hair and my backup dress, at the entire room. "This is what would have happened. You'd have found some way to make my marriage into a joke, the same way you made everything else about me into a joke, for thirty-two years, right up until you decided the joke needed a physical punchline and pushed me into a fountain."

Maren, my sister, the bride, stood a few feet away in her white dress, looking between me and our father with an expression I hadn't seen on her face since we were teenagers — something that looked almost like recognition, almost like shame, quickly suppressed.

"Dad," she said quietly. "You actually pushed her?"