“My mother defended my sister after she destroyed our wedding cake over a $72,000 condo I refused to buy her, but when I opened my banking app and canceled the financial support she’d taken for granted, my entire family turned against me.”

“Liam?” Mom said, her voice dropping into that wheedling, girlish register she used when she wanted to convince me that paying for Kendra’s brakes was an honor. “Honey, please. Don’t ruin your own day.”

“My day was ruined three minutes ago,” I said.

“Liam, she didn’t mean it!” Mom cried, stepping closer, smelling of gardenia perfume and Chardonnay. “She was clumsy! You’re making an enemy out of your sister over an ornament!”

“It wasn’t an ornament, Mom,” I said. “It was three thousand dollars. And it belonged to Leah.”

Kendra scoffed from behind her mother’s shoulder. “Oh, please. Three grand? On cake? That’s literally disgusting. People are starving in the city, Liam, and you spent three bands on flour and eggs just so Leah could look fancy for thirty seconds on an Instagram reel? You’re so performative.”

I looked Kendra directly in the eyes.

She didn’t look away. She never did. She had been taught since the nursery that her gaze was the sun, and the rest of us were simply lucky to be warmed by it. She tilted her chin, waiting for the familiar pattern to play out: my jaw would tighten, I would sigh, Mom would squeeze my hand, I would swallow my pride, and by Tuesday morning I’d be wiring five hundred dollars to her Venmo to prove there were no hard feelings.

“You have frosting on your shoe,” I told her.

Her brow furrowed. “What?”

“Your right heel. There’s buttercream on the strap. It’s oil-based. It’ll ruin the leather if you don’t wash it off with cold water.”

She blinked, confused by the lack of an explosion. “I… whatever.”

I turned to Leah. I took her hand—the one that had left small, half-moon indentations in my arm—and I brought it to my mouth. I kissed the knuckles.

“Come on,” I said softly. “Let’s go take that off.”

“Liam!” Mom called after us as we turned toward the double glass doors leading to the bridal suite. Her voice was climbing an octave, losing its manicured edge, sharpening into panic. “Liam, you come back here! We haven’t done the mother-son dance! The band has the sheet music for the Van Morrison song! Liam!”

I didn’t turn around.

Beside me, Leah walked with her spine straight, her ivory skirt dragging a heavy, butter-slicked trail across the dark oak floorboards, leaving a white streak behind us like the wake of a ship that had just cleared the harbor.

The bridal suite at the Drake was quiet, smelling of cold gardenias and damp silk.

Leah sat on the edge of the king-sized mattress in a white terrycloth bathrobe, her knees pulled up toward her chest. Her hair was still pinned in the elaborate braided crown the stylist had spent two hours building yesterday morning, but three bobby pins had worked themselves loose, dangling against her collarbone.

On the luggage rack across from the bed, the dress hung from a wooden hanger.

It looked worse in the daylight.

The lakefront sun cut through the tall windows, exposing every greasy, yellow stain across the front apron of the skirt. Buttercream isn’t just sugar; it is fat. It seeps into silk faille like motor oil into dry cardboard. The gold leaf had smeared into an ugly, metallic skid mark near the hem.

The door to the bathroom clicked open. I came out with two cups of hotel coffee in cardboard mugs, setting one on the nightstand beside her.

“The dry cleaner downstairs won’t touch it,” I said quietly.

Leah didn’t look up from her knees. “I know.”

“They said the oil has already set into the raw weave. They can try an organic solvent bath on Tuesday, but… the lace will probably dissolve.”

Leah reached out, took the paper cup, and wrapped both hands around it. Her fingers were pale. “Yvette spent three days on those sugar lilies, Liam. She brought them to the hall in Tupperware lined with cotton wool. She was so proud of them.”

“I’m sorry, Leah.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said, her voice dry, cracking slightly at the back of her throat. “You didn’t push the table. You didn’t laugh.”

“I brought her there.”

“She’s your sister. You were supposed to bring her.” Leah finally turned her head, looking at me with eyes that were swollen, bloodshot from four hours of silent crying into a feather pillow while I lay beside her in the dark, watching the red numbers on the bedside clock tick past three, then four, then five. “The thing that hurts… it isn’t the cake, Liam. It’s that she did it because she knew she could. She did it because she knew that within twenty-four hours, your mother would have us sitting at a brunch table, telling us that Kendra has ‘unique emotional needs’ and that we have to be the bigger people.”