My sister sent the text at 2:14 on a Thursday afternoon, while I was standing in a conference room in Manhattan pretending to care about a brand strategy deck no one in that room would remember by Monday.

I looked down when my phone buzzed, expecting another florist question or some last-minute seating nonsense. For six months, my younger sister, Tessa, had turned her wedding into a national emergency funded by anyone weak enough to love her. In our family, that usually meant me.

Instead, I saw this:

You’re too poor for my wedding.

That was the entire message.

No typo. No context. No joke trailing behind it. Just seven words, clean and stupid and cruel.

I stared at the screen long enough that my boss asked if everything was all right. I told him yes, because women like me always say yes first. It’s how we buy ourselves time before deciding whether to burn something down.

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