fund before I was old enough to realize how absurd that was.
Six weeks earlier, Brielle announced that her thirtieth birthday couldn’t be “some depressing steakhouse dinner.”
She wanted an “immersive rooftop experience.”
A private downtown venue.
Custom flowers.
A live band.
Photographer.
Videographer.
Cocktail stations.
Designer favors.
A dessert wall.
Forty carefully chosen guests.
Her first budget had been twenty-five thousand dollars.
Then forty.
Then sixty.
Eventually, nearly eighty thousand dollars.
I laughed the first time she showed me the spreadsheet.
She didn’t.
Now she was standing in my
