I wasn’t invited to my daughter’s wedding in Paris — the same wedding I helped pay for…

The one to the Napa venue? Yes, that one. Carlos hesitated. There may be a cancellation fee depending on timing but may I ask why? The circumstances have changed, I replied, without elaborating.

He looks something up on his screen. You’re in luck. It hasn’t processed yet.

Just in time. He paused, then looked up at me. Are you sure, Mrs. Collins? $50,000 is a significant amount.

I nodded. I’m sure. $50,000.

That was the amount I had planned to send next, on top of the $30,000 already gone. $80,000 total. For a wedding I wasn’t allowed to attend.

I signed the necessary forms and left the bank without a second thought. By the time I got home, there were nine missed calls from Emily, two from Luke. One voicemail simply said, Mom, please.

Don’t do this. I turned off my phone. In the kitchen, I reached for the bottle of red wine I’d been saving for Thanksgiving.

I hadn’t opened it back then. Emily was supposed to visit but she cancelled last minute. Work, she said.

I poured a glass, took it out to the porch, and sat in the fading sunlight. Birds chirped in the trees. A neighbor’s dog barked.

Everything felt still. And then the memories started coming in waves. All the birthdays I planned alone.

All the holiday dinners where I pretended I wasn’t waiting for a call that never came. All the small sacrifices that nobody noticed. The new shoes I didn’t buy.

The car I drove for 14 years. The vacations I postponed. I thought about Andrew’s mother the woman who barely knew Emily yet her opinion carried more weight than mine.

The woman whose idea of family meant excluding the one person who had carried Emily through every hard season of her life. I thought about the way Emily signed off her email with LOL. As if watching your own daughter’s wedding through a screen was a joke.

And finally I thought about myself, not as a mother, not as a widow, but as a woman. What did I want? Um… Peace. Dignity.

A life that didn’t revolve around being useful to people who only showed up when they needed something. That night, around 9 PM, the doorbell rang. I thought about ignoring it, but curiosity got the better of me.

It was Luke. Still in his office clothes, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. He looked uncomfortable, holding his phone in one hand like a shield…