The invitation came on cardstock thick enough to feel expensive before you opened it. Adults only, eighteen plus, strictly enforced. My sixteen year old read my face before she read the card and asked whether that meant she was not going. I told her it was an age rule. She nodded once, and then she asked whether it was because she was adopted. Wren has been mine since she was four. She had already made Delphine a handmade card and left glitter across my kitchen table like hope you could glue down. I did not negotiate. I clicked not attending and closed the laptop, and the messages came anyway, all about consistency and one night, and not one of them typed her name.

Christmas they arrived as though nothing had happened. Coats on the hallway chair, cars down the curb, the same laughter in my kitchen. I served the food, and under every plate I set a sealed cream envelope. Inside was one page. It said this was the last holiday I would host, and it listed, plainly, without adjectives, fourteen separate occasions across six years when my daughter had been introduced as the child I brought rather than as anyone’s granddaughter.