I regret not being more explicit. I also understand that being explicit about conditions on a gift, at the moment of making the gift, would have felt transactional and strange. There is no version of that conversation that would not have seemed like I was hedging my generosity with fine print. I made the gift in good faith. The conditions were, I think, implicit in the nature of what a gift is and what a relationship is, and they became explicit only when Claire dismantled the relationship enough to make them necessary.
She sent me a thank-you text that night. It said: “Today was perfect, thank you for making it happen. I love you.”
I saved that text. I don’t know why I saved it. I save a lot of things.
## The Eight Months Before the Call
The eight months between the Willowmere signing and Claire’s call on that Tuesday in February were not openly difficult. We were not estranged. We talked, we texted, we had dinner when I was in the city for work. Our mother organized a small Christmas gathering at her house in Philadelphia that we both attended, and Claire brought Owen, and we made the kind of careful pleasant family Christmas that families make when they are trying.
But there were things accumulating.
The first was the maid-of-honor situation. Claire had told me early in the engagement that Becca would be her maid of honor, which I understood and did not resent. Becca was her closest college friend; they had shared an apartment in the city for three years; their friendship was the kind of intense daily-contact friendship that mine and Claire’s relationship, across a seven-year age gap and two different cities, had never quite been. I was a bridesmaid. That was fine.