Valentina took a step toward me. “You went through my things?”
I did not raise my voice. “I opened a box hidden in our parents’ attic that contained a letter addressed to me and stolen by you. That is not the argument you want to make today.”
A sound escaped my mother then, small and broken. My father looked at Valentina the way a man looks at a fire spreading across his own floor.
I had not planned to expose the journal pages in front of everyone. For days I had gone back and forth, wondering whether public humiliation was too cruel, whether truth should still be handled gently even after all the gentleness I had wasted on my sister. But then she had chosen my wedding as the place to accuse me, and I understood something clean and simple: privacy is not a shield for someone who keeps using public cruelty as a weapon.
I reached for the small satin bag resting on the chair beside the altar. I had put it there that morning because a part of me, the part that had finally learned, had known Valentina might come.
Inside were photocopies.
My hands did not shake as I took them out.
“I won’t read everything,” I said. “I don’t need to. One sentence is enough.”