And there was Owen’s version in progress, which was that he had significant information gaps and he was working to fill them before deciding what he thought.
These four versions were not equal in their accuracy. I believe my version was the most accurate, but I also understand that I am not a neutral party and that belief is not evidence. What I can say with more confidence is that Claire’s version had the most problems with the facts. The claim that I was trying to destroy her wedding was not supportable by anything I had actually done: I had not canceled the venue, I had not threatened to default on the contract, I had not contacted her caterer or photographer or florist or anyone else. I had made one phone call to one venue coordinator about a transfer clause that the contract explicitly provided for.
What I was doing was declining to fund something I was excluded from. That is not destruction. That is the ordinary relationship between gifts and relationships.
The problem was that these versions were not being compared in a single room with all the relevant people present. They were circulating through a network of relationships — Claire to Owen, Claire to my mother, my mother to me, Becca to me, me to Owen — and each transmission changed the story slightly, as transmissions do. By the time Owen heard Claire’s version of my Christmas remark, it had evolved from a careless offhand comment into a systematic pattern of dismissiveness. By the time I heard about the January dinner from Becca, it had the quality of a thing that had happened that I was supposed to know about but that no one had told me at the time.