Three weddings, three divorces, three different stretches of my life. When I started these chapters, I thought that meant three different stories. Jennifer, then Denise, then Cassie. I'd set down what happened in each one and the part it played in the larger picture. What I wasn't ready for was how much they started to look alike the longer I sat with them.

For a long time I resisted that. They were different people. Different faces, different histories, different rooms, separated by years and by different versions of me. On the surface they had almost nothing in common. But underneath, in the one place that decided how my life actually went, all three ran on the same thing. Control. A need to hold the calendar, the money, the story, the other person. By the end of the book those years finally get a clinical name. While I was living them, I had no name for any of it. It just felt like marriage.

That was the part I wasn't prepared for. If the women were that different on the outside and that alike underneath, then the thing choosing them, again and again, wasn't bad luck. It was me.