I sat down on my couch.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I want to tell you that I think this whole situation is insane,” Becca said. “And I want to tell you that I’ve known Claire for eight years and I love her but she did something really unfair and she knows it, she just can’t say it yet.”
Becca talked for about twenty minutes. She told me that the decision to uninvite me had been made over the course of several weeks, driven by Claire’s anxiety about Owen’s family’s impression and a specific incident I hadn’t known about. Apparently, at a dinner with Owen’s parents in January, someone had made a comment about wedding siblings and family dynamics, and Claire had told a version of our relationship that made me sound like a kind of well-meaning but overbearing older sister who had always overshadowed her. She had told this story with enough self-deprecating humor that it landed as a joke, but she had told it, and it had shifted something in her about whether she wanted the living embodiment of that story at her wedding.
“The story she told them isn’t fair to you,” Becca said. “Like, the actual version, where you paid for her venue and are being excluded from the wedding — that’s not the story she told.”
“What did she tell them?”
“That you two have had some tension and you’re both trying to figure out the family dynamic now that she’s starting her own family with Owen. Made it sound mutual and vague.”