Chloe muttered, “She was acting like a princess all week.”
Something inside me settled when I heard that.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t threaten anyone. I didn’t tell them to leave.
I picked up my phone, walked into the dining room, and called Bellamy Catering.
Two months earlier, I had offered to pay for the catering at Vanessa and her husband Mark’s twentieth-anniversary celebration.
Two hundred guests. Open buffet. Servers. Desserts. Late-night food station.
Total: $19,080.
The contract was in my name because it was my gift.
“Hi,” I told the event manager. “I need to cancel Saturday’s order.”
There was a pause.
“Mrs. Cole, the event is in forty-eight hours. You’ll lose the cancellation deposit.”
“I understand.”
The deposit hurt. But not as much as knowing my daughter was upstairs trying to blot cranberry juice from a dress she had spent months working to afford.
I signed the cancellation form electronically.
The manager warned me that once she released the kitchen crew and rental equipment, restoring the order might not be possible.
I told her I understood.
Ten minutes later, Vanessa’s phone rang.
She looked at the screen, answered, and went pale.
“What do you mean the catering was cancelled?”
I met her eyes across the kitchen.
“You said it was just a dress,” I said. “So this is just dinner.”
Her expression changed.
And for the first time that afternoon, she stopped laughing.
Vanessa ended the call and stared at me as if I had destroyed all her plans.
“You cancelled it?”
“Yes.”
“Rachel, two hundred people are coming.”
“I know. I gave Bellamy the final head count last week.”
Mark came in from the garage carrying folding signs for the party. He took one look at Vanessa’s face and stopped.
