She stepped through the door barefoot, her heels dangling from one hand.
“How was it?”
She smiled.
“Actually good.”
That was enough for me.
The following morning, I showed her Mark’s message.
Emily read it slowly before handing my phone back.
“That makes sense,” she said.
I frowned. “What does?”
She took a seat at the kitchen table.
“Aunt Vanessa has been making comments for months.”
“What comments?”
Emily paused.
“About my grades. My job. The dress. She said Grandma talks about me too much. She told Chloe it must be nice having a cousin who makes everybody else look lazy.”
I felt foolish that I hadn’t noticed.
Emily had always been the quiet one in the family. Chloe was louder, funnier, and more impulsive. I had assumed the tension between them was nothing more than normal cousin rivalry.
Apparently, Emily had been listening to a constant stream of subtle comparisons that the adults around her simply brushed off as teasing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because then everybody would say I was too sensitive.”
That sounded exactly like my family.
By noon, Vanessa had created a group text with me, Mark, our mother, and our older brother, Daniel.
Her message was six paragraphs long.
She said I had “weaponized generosity.”
She said cancelling the catering was financially irresponsible, socially em.bar.ras.sing, and completely disproportionate.
She said Chloe had made an immature mistake and that I had responded by affecting an entire family celebration.
She never mentioned laughing. She never mentioned telling Chloe that Emily needed to be taken down a peg.
I answered with two sentences.
The catering was a gift from me, contracted and paid for under my name.
After what happened inside my home and the way you responded, I withdrew the gift.
