The written transfer at Willowmere was completed nine days before the event. Jordan sent me the countersigned release on a Wednesday morning, and I filed it in the same email folder as the original contract and the deposit receipt. The folder was now a complete record: the commitment made in September, the payment made in September, the complication in February, and the resolution in April. I don’t know if I’ll ever look at those files again. I kept them because I keep things.
The release meant that my financial exposure was definitively ended at the twenty-four hundred dollar deposit. Whatever happened from that point forward with the Willowmere balance was between Claire, Owen, and Jordan. I was a guest. An invited guest.
The invitation itself arrived in my email about a week after the Brooklyn meeting — a digital version of what I understood was the paper invitation Claire had already sent to everyone else. She had my email and she sent it, and it was the formal version with Willowmere Hall and the date and the time, and I printed it out and put it on my refrigerator with a magnet from a trip I’d taken to Portland the previous fall.
I bought a wedding gift. An original watercolor painting of the Hudson Valley landscape by a working artist whose work I’d been aware of for a while, something that felt like it belonged in their apartment without being chosen specifically to demonstrate how thoughtful I was. Something real. I had it shipped to arrive before the wedding so I didn’t have to carry it on the train.