I stood in my small one-bedroom apartment in South Boston, staring into my closet at a worn leather jacket hanging next to a Tom Ford suit I hadn’t touched in three years. The suit still had the dry cleaner’s plastic on it, gathering dust in the corner like a relic from a life I’d deliberately set aside.
My son Michael’s voice was still echoing in my head from our phone call the night before.
“Dad, Jessica’s parents want to meet you. They’re hosting a dinner at their country club this Saturday. Can you make it?”
I could hear the nervousness underneath his words, the careful way he’d phrased it, like he was already bracing for something to go wrong. Michael was twenty-eight, a junior architect doing well for himself, but nothing — nothing at all — compared to the world Jessica’s family lived in. The Bradfords were old Boston money, the kind that came with portraits in mahogany-paneled dining rooms and country club waiting lists longer than most people’s careers.
