He asked about my work, my childhood, and the dreams I had quietly stopped believing in. He never laughed when I said that my greatest wish was to wake up without immediately calculating how much money I owed.
Three months later, Russell invited me to dinner at a small Italian restaurant where everyone seemed to know him.
After dessert, he placed a ring box on the table.
I stared at it, unable to breathe.
“I am not asking you to pretend that this is a fairy tale,” he said. “And I am not asking you to feel something you do not feel. I am asking you to let me give you a life where you do not have to be afraid every day.”
He was thirty years older than me.
He was wealthy.
I was tired of counting coins and pretending I was not drowning.
So I said yes.
Some of my friends called me foolish. Others called me lucky. A few were honest enough to say what everyone else was thinking.
They believed I was marrying him for his fortune.
Perhaps, in the beginning, part of me was.
