The wedding moved from the venue they’d loved to a venue that was smaller and, by Olivia’s description, actually prettier in a different way.
I do not know if she truly believed that or if she was being generous. Maybe both.
I received a formal invitation in the mail three months before the wedding. It came with a small handwritten note from Olivia that said: “I’m really glad you’ll be there.”
I put the invitation on my refrigerator, which is what I do with things I want to remember.
Accountability and an Imperfect Invitation
The corrections my parents made to the family story came in waves over the following weeks, and they were imperfect, as corrections usually are.
My mother talked to the aunt, as I mentioned. She also talked to two cousins who I knew had heard the scholarship version at various holidays. She talked to one of her friends from their neighborhood — a woman who had known our family for twenty years — who had apparently praised my “self-sufficiency” at some point in a way that was based on the scholarship narrative.
Each conversation was slightly different, as I heard about them in fragments. In some versions she said she’d misrepresented things. In others she said she’d left out important details. In none of them, as far as I know, did she say the words “we redirected money we’d promised Nora and let a more comfortable story take its place.” But the corrections happened, and the people who’d believed the scholarship story stopped believing it.