Renata did not understand the sentence I gave her: “Ask your mother why the venue cost zero.” She thought I was being cryptic. I was being exact. Beatriz had spent four months telling everyone she had charmed a Portuguese village into hosting the wedding for free. There was no charm. There was my father’s cousin Duarte, holding nineteen rooms for the Botelho name and refusing my deposit because we were family. The venue cost nothing because it was our village and our family name. The moment my father stopped coming, it was simply gone. Beatriz had been taking credit for a door only my father’s blood could open.

The bank draft was the part they never anticipated. My mother’s twenty-one thousand dollars had been written as a conditional gift, arranged with the local banker who had known my parents for thirty years. I had asked him to structure it that way when I first sensed something was wrong. The condition was clear: the money supported my parents’ participation in the wedding. Remove them, and the draft was recalled before it ever cleared. Beatriz had been holding a cheque that disappeared the moment she reassigned Room Three.

Rafael called from the Lisbon airport. The gates were padlocked, there were no rooms for forty miles, and his family had flown first class to a wedding that no longer existed. He did not shout. He only asked why. I told him he already knew. He had said it himself behind a broken screen door, standing beside a cobblestone street.