“Natalie, please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
That sentence had controlled most of my childhood.
Please don’t make this harder.
Meaning: Give Brielle what she wants.
Brielle had always been the beautiful one, the fragile one, the daughter who “needed support.”
I was the dependable one.
The practical one.
The one who started working at sixteen, helped cover the electric bill through college, and somehow became the family emergency fund before I was old enough to realize how absurd that was.
Six weeks earlier, Brielle announced that her thirtieth birthday couldn’t be “some depressing steakhouse dinner.”
She wanted an “immersive rooftop experience.”
A private downtown venue.
Custom flowers.
A live band.
Photographer.
Videographer.
Cocktail stations.
Designer favors.
A dessert wall.
Forty carefully chosen guests.
Her first budget had been twenty-five thousand dollars.
Then forty.
Then sixty.
Eventually, nearly eighty thousand dollars.
I laughed the first time she showed me the spreadsheet.
She didn’t.
Now she was standing in my hospital room asking for the first payment.
“How much?” I asked.
Brielle glanced at my mother.
That look should have warned me.
“Twenty-seven thousand.”
I laughed so abruptly that pain tore through my incision, turning the laugh into a gasp.
“You came here for twenty-seven thousand dollars?”
“It’s a deposit.”
“It’s a birthday party.”
“It’s my thirtieth.”
“You’ll survive turning thirty without an orchid wall.”
My mother moved closer.
“You don’t have to be cruel.”
I looked at her.
“Cruel?”
Clara shifted, so I lowered my voice.
“Diane, my baby isn’t even a full day old.”
Her lips tightened.
She hated when I called her Diane.
Brielle crossed her arms.
“So you’re refusing?”
“Yes.”
“After you said you’d help me?”
“I said I might contribute something reasonable. A dinner. A photographer. Maybe a few thousand. Not the down payment on a house.”
“You can afford it.”
Something about that sentence caught my attention.
“What?”
She shrugged.
“You and Grant have money.”
“We own a dry-cleaning business. We’re not millionaires.”
“You have savings.”
My pulse quickened.
“How do you know what we have?”
Neither answered.
I tightened my arm around Clara.
“How do you know, Brielle?”
My mother’s expression shifted.
Barely.
But I saw it.
That was when irritation turned into fear.
I reached toward the hospital tray.
“Where’s my phone?”
“You don’t need it right now,” Diane said.
