I finally bought my dream house and invited my family to come see it. No one showed up. Later that night, my dad texted, “We need to talk about the house.” By then, something inside me had already shifted.

“I like it,” I said.

She nodded once, still surveying. “Yeah.”

I took the cake into the kitchen and set it on the counter without opening it. “What was so important?”

She blinked. “What?”

“That my entire family had to skip the one night I asked them to be here.”

Amber shifted her weight. “Things came up.”

“What things?”

She laughed uneasily. “Madison, don’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“You know. Make it into this huge thing.”

I looked at her for a moment. Amber and I had never been close, but we were not strangers either. She had been with Kevin for three years by then, which in my family was approximately two and a half years longer than anyone expected Kevin to sustain attention to one person. She was sharp in a way people often missed because she had learned to wear vagueness like armor. She knew exactly what she was doing when she called something huge or small. She was assigning legitimacy.

“What came up?” I asked again.

She sighed. “Your mom had a book club call. Your dad was tired. Kevin was just… Kevin.”