Lake Como looked unreal on the screen—black water, soft lights, a terrace railing draped in white flowers. Monica spun in a dress that probably required its own insurance policy. She looked perfect in that way that always made me feel like I’d accidentally shown up in the wrong outfit to my own life. Her smile was so polished it didn’t seem like it belonged to a human with sweat glands.
Next to her was Giovanni—her three-month fiancé, her “Italian heir,” the man she claimed was practically royalty. He didn’t look like royalty. He looked like someone waiting for the moment he could slip out the back door. His smile was tight. His eyes kept darting away from the camera, like he was checking who might be watching.
Monica posted a slow pan across the reception: crystal glasses, linen, candles, a string quartet in black. My mother’s laugh floated over it, high and delighted. My dad’s voice, loud enough to be heard even over the music, as if volume could manufacture importance.
I knew the math behind the fantasy. I was a senior financial analyst. I lived in spreadsheets and probabilities. I could smell a bad story the way some people smelled smoke. My parents had been in the red for a decade. They’d refinanced their house twice. They had four credit cards that wheezed every time they swiped them. Last Christmas, my dad had asked me to “temporarily” cover their property taxes because “the bank’s system was down.”
Their system was always down when they wanted money.
And yet there they were in Italy, acting like the Harpers were a dynasty. My mother clinking glasses with a woman Monica kept calling a countess—who looked suspiciously like someone hired to play a countess. My dad slapping backs, tossing around phrases like “our family’s tradition,” as if we’d ever had a tradition besides denial.
I hadn’t gone.
I told them I couldn’t because of work. I said I had a merger to close, which was true, but it wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that I couldn’t stomach watching them worship Monica like she was a miracle while I knew they were one missed payment away from foreclosure.
Monica was the golden child. The star. The one my parents introduced first at parties, the one who got “just one more chance” every time she blew up her life. Paul, my brother, was the problem child—arrests, “misunderstandings,” mysterious emergencies that always ended with my parents calling me to wire something immediately.
