‘It’s Just A Meeting, My Son Said When I Didn’t Receive An Invitation To His Big Engagement Party. So I Transferred Back The $25k From The Honeymoon Fund And Updated The Flights I Had Arranged For Them.

“That’s not the point. The point is that you retaliated by canceling our honeymoon arrangements.”

“Do you know how humiliating it was to have the Positano Villa contact Vanessa directly to confirm the cancellation?”

“Her entire family knows now that my mother was bankrolling our honeymoon, which makes me look like I can’t provide for my wife.”

“I wasn’t bankrolling anything,” I corrected. “I was offering a gift.”

“A very generous one.”

“That I reconsidered after being explicitly excluded from your celebration.”

“Gifts aren’t obligations, James.”

“They’re expressions of relationship.”

“And our relationship changed when you decided I wasn’t important enough to include in your engagement party.”

“So this was punishment,” he concluded, his tone hardening.

“You were hurt about the party, so you decided to hurt us back by canceling everything and running off to Aspen.”

I considered his framing. Testing it against my own understanding. “No.

It wasn’t punishment.”

“It was reallocation.”

“The money I had set aside for your honeymoon was my money—earned through my business, saved from my personal expenses.”

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