He loved her without reservation, and that was precisely the problem. Every kindness from her father, every mention of the house, the money, the life laid out for their unborn child, reminded him how little of it was his. He resented a situation he’d never trade away, grateful and humiliated in the same breath. So he did what men like him were taught to do — he swallowed it, smiled through it, and let the resentment settle into something permanent and unspoken, a quiet rot beneath a man