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I got a hotel room nearby.
My phone vibrated through the night. I let it run down and switched it off.
I lay on the hotel bed staring at the ceiling and replayed the whole evening — the party, the slideshow, my three words: I didn't like it.
The shame of a moment of real emotion, and then the careful thing I'd done with it.
They had detonated a bomb in the shape of my childhood and then looked at me expectantly, as though I should be grateful for the explosion.
I was grateful. That was the bewildering thing. I'd seen the love in it.
I just didn't know what to do with love that arrived packaged as a wound.
I didn't sleep.
In the morning, a knock at the door.
I thought it was the hotel. I opened it.
Jamie.
He was grey under the eyes. He was holding a takeaway bag.
"Sis."
I stepped back to let him in.
He set the bag on the desk. "Mum made this. The soup you like."
I didn't say anything. I sat down on the sofa.
Silence for a while.
"They didn't sleep," Jamie said. "Either of them. They're in pieces."
"Are they sorry for last night? Or sorry it didn't work the way they'd planned?"
He winced. "Don't. Come on."
"I'm asking genuinely."
"Sis. They know they got it wrong. They really do."
"If I hadn't made a scene, Jamie — if I'd just stood there and absorbed it, quietly — would they have known they got it wrong? Or would they have been congratulating themselves on a plan well executed?"
He couldn't answer that.
"I know," he said eventually. "I know. But they do love you. That part's real."
He reached into his pocket and set something on the table in front of me.
A USB drive.
"Dad asked me to give you this. He says — when you've watched it, maybe some things will make more sense."
He stood up. Paused at the door.
"Whatever you think of them. In my mind, you're still my only sister."
He left.
I sat with the USB drive for a long time.
Then I got out my laptop.
The drive had one folder: For Sophie.
Inside: ten subfolders, labelled by age. Ten through nineteen.
I opened Age 10.
A booking confirmation for Disneyland Paris. My birthday. Cancelled, reason given: Emergency business travel.
A video. Dad, facing a camera, practising what he'd planned to say.
Sophie, happy birthday, sweetheart. Dad's taking you somewhere you've always wanted to go—
He was nervous. Stumbling over his words.
I opened Age 12.
Design sketches for a dress. The dress I'd drawn in my notebook — my attempt at a princess skirt. Below them, a long email chain with a dressmaker, refining the details back and forth.
And a photo of the finished dress, in a box in a storage room. Dust on the lid.
The final email was from Mum to the dressmaker: Sorry to cancel. She said she didn't want it.
Then a short video of Mum on her phone, voice tired. "She said no again. Are we — have we really got this so wrong?"
I kept going.
Concert tickets, never redeemed. A mobile phone in a box, never given. A camera she'd mentioned once, bought and then put away when she stopped answering messages.
Every year: something prepared. Every year: cancelled, or declined, or abandoned on a shelf somewhere.
And then the last file on the drive.
Security footage from the venue, last night.
After I left.
The room emptied except for three people. Mum had folded into Dad's arms and was crying without stopping. He held her, kept saying something — the audio was too low to make out, but his expression said it clearly enough: I'm sorry. This is my fault.
Jamie was standing against the far wall. He hit the wall once with his fist. Then he slid down it and sat on the floor with his knees pulled up and his head down.
The three of them in that enormous room, all the pink decorations still up.
I closed the laptop.
I was crying again. I hadn't noticed when I'd started.