There it was. Simple. As if my entire life could be contained in that miserable adjective. As if I were a problem he needed to apologize for. I took a deep breath. “Okay, Marcus. I’ll be there.”

At that moment, I decided that if my son thought I was a poor woman, if his wife’s parents were coming ready to judge, then I would give them exactly what they expected. I would pretend to be broke, naive, and desperate. A mother barely surviving. I wanted to feel firsthand how they treated someone who had nothing. I wanted to see their true faces, because I suspected Simone and her family were the type of people who measured others by their bank accounts. And my instinct never fails.