“The receipts will be in your email or your banking app.”
“You have no right to search my phone.”
“The dress money came from our joint account.”
Alexis clutched her purse against her side.
Dad did not reach for it.
He simply opened his own banking app.
“I transferred twelve hundred dollars,” he said.
“You told me both dresses cost about the same.”
Brianna whispered, “Mine was more.”
Alexis shot her a warning look.
“How much more?” Dad asked.
Brianna swallowed.
“The dress was nine hundred and fifty.
Then shoes and alterations.”
Dad looked at the plastic rhinestones sewn across my chest.
“And hers?”
No one answered.
I remembered the garment bag without a store name.
The missing receipt.
The way Alexis had rushed us away before Dad could take a photograph.
She had expected me to wear the dress for a few hours, absorb the laughter, and remove it before he looked closely.
She had not expected the collar to catch on a chair.
She had not expected me to recognize my mother’s stitches.
Dad turned to me.
“May I look at the inside hem?”
I nodded.
He crouched and carefully lifted the edge of the mustard overskirt.
Beneath it, the original gold skirt had been folded upward and temporarily fastened to make the dress look too short in front and too long in back.
Dad found another set of blue Xs near the side seam.
His face folded.
For a moment, he was no longer an angry husband standing in a high school gym.
He was a widower touching something his wife’s hands had once held.
“I remember this repair,” he said.
“Your mom caught the dress on a fence after prom.
She refused to let anyone else fix it.”
I knelt beside him.
The blue thread was faded but intact.
Alexis stepped closer.
“Please take it off,” she said again.
“You’re damaging it.”
I looked up at her.
“You already damaged it.”
“I can fix everything.”
“No,” Dad said.
“You can’t.”
One of the parent chaperones approached and quietly asked whether we needed a private room.
Dad thanked her.
I expected him to lead us away, but he looked at me first.
“This is your prom,” he said.
“What do you want to do?”
It was such a simple question, but it stopped me.
For months, decisions had been made around me.
Alexis chose the dress.
Alexis controlled the money.
Alexis decided how much time I received in the bathroom and whether Dad could take a picture.
Even my humiliation had been planned without my participation.
