The question everyone kept asking, of course, was whether I was inviting my family.
Waverly never pressured me either way.
She just said, “Whatever you decide, I’ll stand next to you.”
Which is exactly the kind of thing that makes you want to marry someone immediately on the spot.
I thought about it for weeks.
Part of me wanted them there, not because I needed their approval, but because I wanted them to see what I’d built without them.
The career. The woman. The life.
Is that petty?
Maybe.
But I think there’s a difference between wanting revenge and wanting recognition.
I didn’t want to hurt my parents.
I just wanted them to look at me and actually see me. Not the other one. Not the one who does something with numbers.
Me.
In the end, I sent one invitation to my parents, not to Sutton.
I wrote a short note with it that said, “I’d love to have you there. This is important to me.”
I didn’t explain the situation with Sutton. I didn’t rehash the lake house. I just extended the invitation and left it at that.
My mother called 3 days later.
She said she and Dad would love to come, but that it would be hurtful not to invite Sutton.
I told her that Sutton and I weren’t speaking.
She said, “Well, that’s between you two, but he’s your brother, Oliver.”
I said, “And I was his brother when he sent me a list of approved dates to visit my own family’s house. Where was the family loyalty then?”
She didn’t have a good answer for that.
She said she’d talked to my father about it and get back to me.
She never got back to me.
They didn’t come to the wedding.
Let me say that again so it lands properly.
My parents chose not to come to my wedding because I didn’t invite the brother who had treated me like a stranger with a reservation.
They picked sudden again, as always.
The sun doesn’t share the sky with the lamp.
The wedding was still perfect.
Waverly looked like she’d been carved out of moonlight and good decisions.
Harlland walked her down the aisle, and I swear the man was trying so hard not to cry that his face looked like it was solving a complicated equation.
Roslin handled everything with the precision of a Swiss watch.
My best man was Calter, my boss, who gave a speech that managed to be funny, touching, and mildly inappropriate all at the same time, which is exactly what you want from a best man.
I missed my parents that day.
I’d be lying if I said otherwise, but I didn’t miss them enough to let them use my wedding as leverage to force me back into a family dynamic that had been hurting me for 30 years.
There’s a difference between missing someone and missing the version of them you wish they were.
After the wedding, things accelerated.
The waterfront project hit a critical phase, and I was managing a team of 23 engineers.
The city council was breathing down our necks about timelines.
The general contractor was behind on the foundation pour, and there were about six different problems happening at any given time that all felt like they were going to end my career.
But I kept my head down and worked through every single one of them.
Coulter told me once that the mark of a great engineer isn’t that they never have problems. It’s that they solve problems so quietly that nobody realizes there were problems in the first place.
I took that to heart.
By summer, the project was ahead of schedule.
The developer, a guy named Emit Tras, who had more money than personality, flew in from Chicago to tour the site.
He spent 40 minutes with me, asked about 15 technical questions that most developers wouldn’t even think to ask, and then shook my hand and said, “You’re the real deal, Oliver.”
Two weeks later, his company offered me a consulting contract for their next three developments.
The kind of contract that had a number on it that made my accountant actually gasp audibly during a phone call.
Waverly and I bought a house.
Not just any house.
A four-bedroom Craftsman in a neighborhood I’d driven through for years thinking, someday.