Chapter 2: Two Hundred Dollars
I should explain about the dress.
Six months before the wedding, Brittany and I had stood in a bridal shop in Scottsdale while my four bridesmaids tried on sage-green chiffon. Brittany came out of the dressing room in something else entirely. Long. Ivory. Fitted.
“What do you think?” she said. “I look so washed out in green. This is basically champagne.”
“It’s basically white,” said my maid of honor.
“It’s cream.”
“Brittany,” I said, as gently as I could, “I’d really love it if you matched the other girls.”
She went back in and changed. She was all smiles about it. Then she told Marcus I’d “body-shamed” her in front of strangers, and Marcus called me that night to ask why I always had to make things hard for his wife.
She stepped down from being a bridesmaid two weeks later. “I don’t want to cause drama,” she wrote in the group chat.
And today she’d shown up in ivory satin anyway.
That wasn’t all. During the cocktail hour, she’d excused herself from the receiving line with her hand over her mouth and made a loud retching sound by the bar. Twice. During our first dance, she’d gone pale and grabbed a chair, and three of my aunts had left the dance floor to fan her with programs. During the father-daughter dance, she’d asked the bartender for crackers in a voice the whole room could hear.
“Morning sickness,” my mother had whispered to me, glowing. “Isn’t it a little early to tell?”
I hadn’t put it together. Who puts that together at her own wedding?
Now I reached the AV booth at the back of the ballroom.
The tech was a skinny kid, maybe twenty-four, with shaggy red hair and a headset slung around his neck. His name tag said KYLE. His hand was on the laptop’s trackpad, and it was trembling.
“Turn it off,” I said.
“Ma’am, I—”
“Turn it off, Kyle.”
He clicked. The ultrasound vanished. The screen went to our engagement photo, Owen and me in a field of desert marigolds, and a couple of guests on the dance floor said, “Aww, no!” like I’d taken away their dessert.
Kyle didn’t look up.
“Did you know?” I asked. “Before tonight?”
He swallowed so hard I heard it over the music.
“She came by the venue last Tuesday,” he said. “Your sister-in-law. She gave me a flash drive. She said the bride knew about it. She said it was a surprise for the parents, and you’d planned it together, and I just had to cue it before the father’s speech.”
“And you believed her?”
He finally looked at me. His ears were bright red.
“She gave me two hundred bucks,” he said miserably. “I’ve got student loans. She said you knew. I swear to God, she said you knew.”
I put my hand on the edge of his table because the room was tilting a little.
Last Tuesday. That was the day Brittany had texted me a heart emoji and “Can’t wait for Saturday!! 💕”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Is there anything else on that drive?”
Kyle hesitated.
That hesitation went through me like cold water.
“Kyle.”
“There’s a second file.” He turned the laptop so only I could see it. “She told me to play it right after your dad’s speech, before the cake. It’s—”
He clicked, and a still frame came up on the little screen, not the big one. Pink and blue balloons. A countdown in fat white numbers.
“It’s a gender reveal,” Kyle said. “With confetti cannons. She left two of them with the DJ.”
I looked across the ballroom. Behind the DJ’s table, propped against a speaker, stood two long cardboard tubes wrapped in pink and blue tissue paper.
Right next to my wedding cake.
