Then I left the group chat.
Vanessa called our mother.
Our mother called me.
“Couldn’t you at least help them find someone else?” she asked.
“I already helped them find someone,” I said. “Two months ago.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. I do.”
My mother sighed.
“Your sister is devastated.”
“So was Emily.”
There was a long pause.
Then came the sentence I had been expecting.
“But Vanessa’s party involves two hundred people.”
I looked at the stained green gown draped over the back of a chair.
“That doesn’t make her feelings two hundred times more important.”
My mother had nothing to say.
Saturday arrived.
Vanessa and Mark did not cancel the anniversary celebration.
Instead, they improvised.
Mark found a local barbecue restaurant willing to prepare trays of pulled pork, chicken, beans, slaw, and cornbread.
They couldn’t provide servers, china, plated appetizers, desserts, or the midnight food station.
Mark’s business partner borrowed two warming cabinets from his church. Daniel picked up disposable plates and cutlery from a warehouse store. My mother ordered sheet cakes from a grocery bakery.
The elegant garden party Vanessa had planned turned into a busy backyard buffet.
There was still food.
Nobody went hungry. Nobody’s flight was wasted.
But it wasn’t the celebration she had spent a year imagining.
I knew because she posted almost nothing from the event.
Vanessa normally documented everything. Birthdays, brunches, airport lounges, hotel lobbies. She could turn an ordinary Tuesday coffee into a twelve-photo story.
For her twentieth anniversary, she posted one picture: herself and Mark standing beside the cake.
On Monday morning, she came to my house.
I opened the door but didn’t invite her inside.
She looked exhausted.
“Can we talk?”
“We can talk here.”
She glanced toward the street.
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
Her jaw tightened, but she stayed on the porch.
“Mark told you what Chloe said.”
“He did.”
“I was venting.”
“To your seventeen-year-old daughter about my seventeen-year-old daughter.”
“I wasn’t telling her to ru!n the dress.”
