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 told the whole wedding party that she, personally, had charmed a Portuguese village into hosting for free, and had let that story become the centre of her own importance for four months. There was no charm. There was my father’s cousin Duarte, holding nineteen rooms for the name Botelho, refusing my deposit because we were blood. The venue cost zero because it was my family’s village, and my family’s name, and the moment my father was no longer coming, it was simply gone. Beatriz had been taking credit for a door that only my father’s blood could open.
The bank draft was the part they never saw coming. My mother’s twenty-one thousand had been written as a conditional gift, drafted that way by the man at our local bank who has known my parents thirty years, because I asked him to when I first sensed something was wrong. The condition was plain in the paperwork nobody read. The funds 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 dissolved in her hand the day she reassigned Room Three.