After I refused to pay for my daughter’s luxury wedding, she blocked my number. A few days later she texted, all sweetness and olive branches, and invited me to a “reconciliation dinner.” But the moment I walked into the dim, warm light of the Italian restaurant on Meridian Street, I saw three men in suits already waiting at our table, a neat stack of paperwork laid out between the water glasses. My daughter looked me straight in the eye and said, “Either you agree tonight… or you won’t be part of your grandson’s life anymore.”
I didn’t raise my voice.
I simply opened my purse, took out my phone, made one call, and said calmly, “Sure—but before anything happens, someone wants to say a few words.”
The burgundy dress hung in my Indianapolis closet like a ghost of better times. I’d worn it to Annie’s high school graduation at the downtown convention center, then to her college commencement in Bloomington, and later to celebrate her first promotion at the marketing firm off Keystone Avenue. Every time, she’d smiled and told me how elegant I looked, how proud she was to have me as her mother.
Now, as I smoothed the fabric over my sixty-two-year-old frame in the mirror of my little Midwestern duplex, I wondered if this would be the last time I dressed up for my daughter.
Three weeks had passed since our explosive argument about her wedding budget.
Sixty-five thousand dollars.
That’s what Annie and her fiancé, Henry, had demanded I contribute. Not asked—demanded. As if my late husband’s life insurance, the nest egg I’d carefully preserved in a modest brokerage account and a paid-off house in a quiet Indiana suburb, was somehow their birthright.
“Mom, you’re being selfish,” she’d said, her voice sharp as winter wind off the canal downtown.
“You’re sitting on all that money while we’re trying to start our life together. Don’t you want me to be happy?”
I’d tried to explain that happiness didn’t require imported Italian marble for their bathroom renovation or a destination honeymoon in the Maldives. I’d offered fifteen thousand—enough to pay for a beautiful local ceremony, a reception hall with fairy lights, and a honeymoon that didn’t involve a private villa and infinity pool.
But Annie had looked at me with such cold calculation that I barely recognized the little girl who used to bring me dandelions from the yard and call them sunshine flowers.
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