Then he asked how I would feel about an arrangement. About one day marrying Alannah.

By then, I’d seen more than one kind of marriage work. My parents had chosen each other and built something solid from it. Alannah’s parents had been brought together by arrangement, and their marriage was just as strong. Different beginnings. Same result.

So I agreed to it. Not because I was in love, and not because I’d chosen her, but because it made sense. She knew the kind of life we lived, our families were already tied together, and it wasn’t as if she had ever been invisible to me.

I remember the first time my family went to the O’Connells’ house after they arrived from Ireland. My mother had taken one look at her and called her a wee sidhe, and she hadn’t been wrong. Alannah fit the name, smaller than the other girls her age, with strawberry-blonde hair that caught the light, bright blue eyes, and pale skin scattered with freckles. She’d been cute then, and she’d grown into a real beauty, one I sometimes had trouble believing was meant to be mine.

So the match was made, but we wouldn’t marry until Alannah turned eighteen. The wedding still felt far enough away that I could pretend it didn’t really count yet. And it wasn’t as if I’d been innocent when I’d agreed to it. I’d already had women by then, and being promised to Alannah hadn’t made me stop. I told myself there was no harm in it, not when none of it had really been my choice.