“Two nights?”
He apologized immediately.
He said he had assumed Mom had already spoken to me because she had been so specific about where everyone was supposed to go.
His sons would be collected.
My parents would take the shuttle.
Then they would catch their flight alone.
Everyone had a destination.
Everyone except Abigail.
That was when the one-way shuttle receipt stopped looking strange and started looking deliberate.
I asked him to forward every message our parents had sent him about the change.
Three minutes later, screenshots began arriving.
The timestamps mattered.
Two days before the trip, my mother had written that traveling with three children was going to be “too much.”
My father had replied separately that they had “earned some peace.”
My brother had asked whether they were canceling the entire family trip.
Mom said no.
They were still going.
Just without the children.
My brother then asked the obvious question: why had they invited the kids in the first place?
