At my sister’s $320,000 wedding, right in front of 200 guests, my mother slipped an $800 check into my hand and whispered, “That’s all you deserve.” I stood there in an $89 black dress while white orchids spilled over every table at the Umstead in Raleigh and crystal light made everything look softer than it really was.

“Oh, you’re the other one.”

I kept smiling. “I’m Hermina.”

“Right, right,” she said with a small laugh. “Francis always talks about Victoria. She’s the star of the family, isn’t she?”

Across the room, Daniel Brooks sat at table fourteen near the service entrance. He was seated beside two of Nathan Whitaker’s distant colleagues who spent most of the evening discussing golf handicaps. By the time the speeches finished and Victoria and Nathan took their first dance to Sinatra, the room had that loose champagne glow that settles over expensive parties once everyone knows the bill has already been paid.

I stepped away from the guest-book table and went looking for Daniel. I just wanted to sit beside him for a few minutes, maybe eat something, maybe steal one quiet moment before the night ended.

I only made it halfway across the ballroom before my mother appeared beside me.

“Hermina, come here.”

She guided me toward a corner near the bar. It wasn’t fully private. A few guests at a nearby high-top table could easily hear us. A waiter was restocking champagne flutes only a few feet away.

“I understand you and Daniel are planning something,” she said.

Her tone sounded exactly like the one she used when I was twelve and she caught me sketching instead of finishing my algebra homework. Disappointed, but never surprised.

“You asked last week if we would help with your wedding,” she continued. “So, here.”

She placed a small white envelope in my hand, standard size, light.

I opened it.

Inside was a check written in my mother’s careful cursive. Eight hundred dollars.

On the memo line, she had written: Wedding contribution, Hermina.

I looked up. She was watching my face with the clinical curiosity of someone observing a laboratory experiment.

“That’s all you deserve,” she said quietly, barely louder than the music.

But the waiter heard it. I saw his hand pause midair over a champagne glass. A woman at the nearby table glanced in our direction and then quickly looked away, the way people do when they realize they’ve witnessed something they wish they hadn’t.