I forwarded this email to Claire with a note that said: “Jordan needs to hear from you before Friday. Please make a decision about the contract.”
Claire called me within thirty minutes.
“You’re forcing my hand,” she said.
“Jordan is working within the terms of the contract I signed,” I said. “The deadline is the deadline. I didn’t set it.”
“You know we can’t cover seventy-two hundred dollars in three weeks.”
“I don’t actually know that,” I said. “What I know is that when we booked Willowmere, I said I would help cover it because I wanted to be at your wedding. And I’m not going to be at your wedding.”
“If I invite you back –“
“Claire.” I took a breath. “I would like nothing more than to be at your wedding. That’s the truth. But I need you to want me there because I’m your sister and you love me and you want me to be part of your wedding day. Not because I’m paying for the room.”
She was quiet.
“I don’t know how to do that right now,” she finally said. “I need more time.”
“You have until Friday,” I said. “Jordan’s timeline, not mine.”
I hated every word of that conversation.
## What Owen Did
Owen Parker, to his credit, did several things in the week after receiving my email.
He read the contract. He asked Claire directly about the invitation conversation and about the characterization of our relationship she had given his parents in January. He researched, apparently, what a project manager’s normal salary range looks like, because he mentioned in a later conversation with me that he had not understood the financial weight of what I had done until he thought about it in context — that twenty-four hundred dollars in a nonrefundable deposit was not nothing, and that the conditional seven-thousand-two-hundred dollar offer was a significant gesture that he had not fully appreciated until he saw the full picture.