## The Wedding
We got married in October. Small ceremony, forty people, a venue that was a converted mill with good light and no pretension. I wore the dress with the overskirt and the embroidered cuffs and my mother cried when she saw me in it, which I remember clearly. We have photos.
My mother told me that day that she had never seen anyone look so beautiful in something they’d made themselves. She said: ‘The cuffs are extraordinary.’ She knew what she was looking at. She had been at the house in July and August when I was working on them; she had seen them in progress. She knew those cuffs had taken months.
I want to put this in the record because it matters: she knew. Not in the abstract. In the specific. She had watched me work on those cuffs. She had seen how long it took. And then fourteen months later, when it was useful to her to minimize what those cuffs were, she did. She told herself a story about them that erased what she knew from having witnessed it.
I am not saying this to indict her. I am saying it because understanding how that erasure happened — how someone can genuinely watch a thing being made and then later unthink what they know — is part of understanding the full shape of what happened.
## How the Home Repair Started
The pipe issue was discovered in late October, right around our first anniversary. Ben noticed the baseboard in the second bedroom had softened slightly, which is not something most people would notice or act on, but Ben is methodical about things like this. We had a plumber come, who found a slow pinhole leak in a copper supply line that had been leaking probably for six months, hidden behind the drywall.