She did not hurry. Eleanor Wellington did not hurry unless someone was bleeding on one of her rugs. Even then, she preferred to supervise.
“Mother,” I said, keeping my voice even. “The decorations are lovely.”
She stopped a foot away from me, close enough to invade my space but not close enough to embrace. Her eyes moved over me in a practiced scan: hair, makeup, blouse, skirt, shoes, jewelry. She inspected me the way a jeweler inspects a diamond for cracks, though in my case she always hoped to find them.
“I’m surprised you came,” she said.
Her lips curved into a pitying smile.
“I told your father it would be too painful for you. Being around all this… life.”
She gestured vaguely toward the room, toward the flowers, the strollers, the pregnant women, the cake, the soft pink monument to everything she believed I had failed to become.
I looked past her shoulder at Chloe. My sister had seen me now. Her smile trembled slightly before she lifted one hand in a small wave.
“I’m happy for Chloe,” I said. “Why would it be painful?”
Eleanor sighed.
It was a theatrical sigh, a sound calibrated to be overheard. Mrs. Higgins and Sylvia Sterling paused just close enough to pretend they were not listening.
“Oh, darling,” my mother said. “We don’t have to pretend. We all know about your situation.”
There it was.
Situation.
In the Wellington family, words were chosen carefully, not to spare feelings but to sharpen injury.
“The struggles,” she continued, placing one cold hand on my arm. “It’s brave of you to show up, knowing you’re… well, incompatible with this world.”
Incompatible.
That one was new.
Usually, when she was feeling less creative, she preferred barren, defective, unfortunate, or the phrase that had ended my relationship with her altogether: damaged goods.
“I’m doing just fine,” I said, gently removing my arm from under her hand.
“Are you?” She tilted her head. “You look tired. And that dress… is it off the rack? Oh, Elara. I always worried that without a husband to take care of you, you’d just fade away.”
She did not know.
None of them knew.
They did not know about Alexander.
They did not know about the brownstone on Beacon Hill where five children had turned every polished surface into a battlefield of toys, fingerprints, spilled milk, and impossible joy. They did not know that the severe endometriosis she had used as proof of my failure had been a battle I fought with surgeons, specialists, hormones, needles, and more hope than I thought a human body could hold. They did not know about Italy, about vows said under olive trees, about the ring under my glove, about the art gallery I did not merely work in but owned.
Most importantly, they did not know about the children.
