He had attached a spreadsheet.
The total projected cost of Ivy and Logan’s wedding sat just under one hundred eighty thousand dollars. Venue. Flowers. Designer invitations. Entertainment. Transportation. Security. A three-day welcome experience for out-of-town guests. A honeymoon in Lake Como. There were color-coded columns assigning contribution expectations to different family members.
Mine was thirty thousand dollars.
Not discussed. Not requested. Assigned.
I read the spreadsheet twice, then once more, just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.
The thing about wealth is that people only resent your money when they suspect you have more than they do. But when they think you have less, they feel oddly entitled to whatever you can scrape together for their comfort. My family had spent years assuming I was drifting, underperforming, figuring things out. Yet somehow that same fictional version of me was still expected to produce a five-figure contribution to finance Ivy’s dream aesthetic.
