Two days before my brother’s wedding, my mother forbade me from coming, and when she read my reply, April’s smile disappeared

Forty-eight hours before the wedding, my mother wrote to me that I could no longer attend my only brother’s wedding, and at that moment I still had in my hand the receipt for a transfer of three hundred and twenty thousand pesos.

I read the message three times. It seemed that the words became heavier with every reading.

“Do not come on Saturday. April says that your presence there will spoil the mood.”

My phone lay on the kitchen table, and beside it was a coffee cup whose rim had a small crack. For four years I had drunk coffee from that cup while checking the family bills and saving money for my future apartment.

Mateo entered the room and immediately understood that something had happened.

“Valeria, why are you so quiet?”

I handed him the phone.

He read the message, then looked at my banking application.

“Is this the amount that you transferred yesterday?”

“Three hundred and twenty thousand pesos.”

“And now they are telling you not to come to the wedding?”

I nodded. I could not make a sound.

The money was not the most painful thing. Emiliano had been my childhood companion, the keeper of my first secrets, and the only person with whom I had shared even a single loaf of bread after our father’s workshop went bankrupt.

When he met April, I thought a new sister had entered our family. April often called me.

“When we get married, I want you to be close to me,” she would tell me with a laugh. “You will become part of my family.”

Then everything slowly changed.

When I began talking at family dinners, April changed the subject. If Emiliano and I recalled a childhood story, she smiled and said:

“Has your closed club gathered again?”

One evening, in January, Emiliano called me. They had found an old colonial estate in Atlixco from which the volcanoes could be seen.

“We are short of money, Vale,” he told me quietly. “If we do not reserve it this week, we will lose the date.”

April sighed in the background.

“Maybe we should choose a simpler place.”

But I understood that they were waiting for my answer.

Three days later I checked my savings. This money was the first payment for my future apartment. Still, I transferred it.

Emiliano called me immediately. He was crying.

“Vale, I will never forget this.”

“Do not return it. Have a wedding that you will remember all your life.”

“You will not simply be a guest. This wedding belongs to you too.”

Two weeks later I understood what “part” meant to him.

At the first meeting I suggested a cheap option for the flowers. April smiled at me politely.

“How sweet of you, but we already know exactly what everything should be like.”

Then the meeting was moved to Tuesday at two in the afternoon, when I had an important meeting at work. Later no one warned me anymore. I saw the menu, the colors, and the musicians only on social media.

One Sunday my mother called me.

“We are checking the table arrangement; come if you can.”

I traveled for two hours. April opened the door and looked at me in surprise.

“Oh, didn’t they tell you? That was yesterday.”

Inside there were still wet glasses and fabric samples laid out. They had finished everything only recently.

That evening I asked Emiliano directly:

“Why do I go everywhere only when everything has already been decided?”

“April thinks that because you paid the money, you want to control everything.”

“I only offered cheap flowers and to separate two uncles who love fighting.”

“Exactly. You always have an opinion.”

At that moment something broke inside my heart.

But I still kept trying.

Then I saw the invitations at my parents’ house. My name was not on the wedding procession list.

“Mom, am I not [on it]?”

She lowered her eyes.

“April thought you would enjoy it more as an ordinary guest.”

I went to Emiliano. He showed me several pictures on his phone. It looked as if I had written that April was greedy, that her family was vulgar, and that without this money they would not have a respectable wedding.

“I did not write this.”

“Your name is here.”

“You can put my name on any picture. That does not mean I wrote it.”

Emiliano’s face became stern.

“April would not need to invent this.”

Those words pierced me like thorns. He needed evidence to believe me, but to believe April he needed only her voice.

My parents did not listen to me either.

“Maybe you no longer remember exactly what you wrote,” my father said.

“I did not write anything.”

My mother sighed.

“Please lower your voice. There is little time left before the wedding.”

Three days before the wedding, I asked only one question in the family chat: “What time should I come for the photos?”

Twenty minutes later I received my mother’s reply.

“Do not come on Saturday. April says that your presence will spoil the mood.”

I called my mother, my father, and Emiliano. No one answered.

Then I understood that this was not only April’s decision.

They had all decided together to leave me outside.

The next day Mateo took me out of the city. We hardly spoke on the road. I only checked the small leather card in my bag, in which my father’s workshop’s old copper key lay. I had kept that key since childhood.

At six in the evening, when I knew that Emiliano was supposed to be standing by the altar at that estate, I turned off my phone.

I called no one.

I ruined nothing.

I simply stopped, for the first time, trying to save them from the consequences of their decision.

Two days later I turned on my phone. I had no messages from my family, but Sofia wrote to me: “Vale, did you really threaten April that you would cancel the wedding if you were not the maid of honor?”

My hands went cold. They had not merely rejected me. They had created such a person about me that everyone would find it easy to hate her.

And when I began typing a reply to Sofia, a second message appeared on the screen. This time from an unknown number.

“If you want to learn the truth, come to the old photo studio tomorrow at ten in the morning. Alone.”…

I held the message from the unknown number in my hand for a long time. The old photo studio was half an hour from our house, on the narrow street where, as a child, I had bought tools for the workshop together with my father.

Mateo looked at my face and immediately understood that I had already received an answer.

“Do not go alone.”

“That is exactly what the message says.”

“That is why you should not go alone.”

At five minutes past ten in the morning I opened the studio’s heavy door. Inside was the smell of paper, dust, and old photographic chemicals. Blinds hanging on the window were striking against the wind, and photographs of old weddings hung on the wall.

A woman of about thirty stood at the counter. She held a small memory card in her hand.

“Valeria?”

“Who are you?”

“Elena. I used to work here with April. I did invitation designs.”

Her fingers trembled as if that card were a heavy piece of metal.

“Why did you contact me now?”

Elena locked the door.

“Because yesterday April called me and asked me to delete all the old files. But one copy remained with me.”

She turned on the computer. Several folders appeared on the screen. One of them was labeled “Family.”

“Are these only invitation files?” I asked.

“No. April often prepared screenshots to check the design layout. She used the same program to make the pictures of your correspondence.”

My breath caught.

“Are you saying they are fake?”

“I am saying that these pictures were processed in my program.”

Elena opened one of the files. A message composed in my name appeared on the screen. The letters looked familiar, but below them the date and time did not match each other.

“Look,” she said. “This image was created on the day when I was at the meeting with you. That evening April told me that she would use this material to protect her family.”

“Why did you not tell me then?”

Elena lowered her eyes.

“I was afraid. The wedding was a large order. Later I realized that you were supposed to lose your whole life because of something you had not written.”

She handed me the card.

“Here are the file creation times, the change history, and one audio recording. It was recorded accidentally when I left the computer switched on.”

We played the audio.

At first there was only the sound of a keyboard. Then April’s voice was heard.

“If we leave Valeria close again, she will convince everyone that she bought everything. Emiliano is already in a debt of gratitude. We simply have to show that she controls everyone.”

The second voice was my mother’s.

“But she paid so much money.”

“Exactly why they must believe that she is demanding something in return.”

The audio ended there.

For several seconds I could not move. The wall clock ticked loudly in the studio.

“Will this be enough?” I asked.

“If a specialist confirms that the files were processed, yes. But there is one thing you should know.”

“What?”

“April will not stop because of this.”

That same day I met Mateo’s friend, Nikoloz. He worked on the examination of digital evidence. In his office I found blue curtains and small screws scattered on the table.

Nikoloz carefully studied the files.

“The text layer in the pictures was added separately,” he said. “This does not normally happen on a real screen photographed with a phone.”

“Can you confirm that in writing?”

“I can. But this alone cannot prove who created the files.”

“I know who created them.”

“You know. The court needs a chain.”

In the evening I called Sofia.

“I want only one thing from you. Tell me exactly who called you and what they said.”

“April. She told me that you were threatening to cancel the wedding.”

“Did she send you this text?”

“No, she told me orally. But Mother repeated the same thing.”

“And you believed it?”

Sofia’s voice broke off.

“Everyone was saying the same thing.”

“Everyone because they were repeating the same thing to everyone.”

The next morning Emiliano called me for the first time. His voice was tired and irritated.

“Vale, let us finish all this. The wedding has already taken place. Why do you want to create problems again?”

“I did not create a problem.”

“April says that you are blackmailing her.”

“Tell April that I have evidence.”

Silence fell on the line.

“What evidence?”

“The kind that will answer your questions.”

“If you are asking for money, tell me directly.”

“Do you still think I am talking because of money?”

“I do not know what I think.”

“That is the worst thing, Emiliano. You do not know me at all anymore.”

That evening Nikoloz called me. His voice was more serious than usual.

“Valeria, I found something else besides the files. A backup copy exists of the correspondence that April changed. But the deleted messages did not disappear only from her phone.”

“Where is it?”

“In the family account. And it shows that your phone was not logged in at all that night.”

“Whose was logged in?”

Nikoloz exhaled before answering.

“April’s phone. But tomorrow morning you must see her face to face. I have already arranged a meeting and prepared all the files in one place.”

“Where?”

“At the same estate where the wedding took place. I also asked April to come.”

My heart sped up as if my body had understood in advance that it was returning to the past.

The next morning my mother, father, Emiliano, and April were waiting for me at the estate gate. April wore a white jacket, and a small pearl necklace hung around her neck.

She saw me and smiled.

“I hope you will not make a scene this time.”

Nikoloz put a black folder on the table.

“No one will leave today until they understand what really happened.”

April reached toward the folder. But before she opened it, Nikoloz placed her phone on the table and calmly said:

“First we must listen to this audio…”

Nikoloz played the audio recording. A heavy silence fell over the estate. Outside, water from the fountain fell into the stone basin, but inside everyone heard only the voices of April and my mother.

“If we leave Valeria close, she will convince everyone that she bought everything…”

My mother raised her head.

“This is not our conversation.”

“Mother, it is your voice,” I said.

Emiliano looked at April.

“What is this?”

April reached for the phone, but Nikoloz covered it with his hand.

“Do not touch it. A copy is already stored in several places.”

The audio continued. April’s voice clearly said that I had to be made to look like a “demanding and controlling person.” Then her laughter could be heard.

“If we tell everyone that she demanded to be the maid of honor and threatened to cancel the wedding if refused, no one will ask why we did not invite her.”

Emiliano grabbed the chair. His fingers turned white.

“You said this?”

April looked first at him, then at me.

“The words were cut.”

“The entire recording is here,” Nikoloz replied. “A specialist checked the file sequence, the continuity of the sound, and the creation time.”

He opened the folder and handed several sheets to each of us. It said there that the screenshots spread about me had been processed. The text layers had been added separately, while the original correspondence backup contained no such phrases at all.

My father looked at the sheet.

“Maybe the program made a mistake.”

“Not the program,” Nikoloz said. “Someone created these files by hand. The change was made from April’s account.”

My mother’s face changed.

“April, why?”

April lost her confidence for the first time.

“Because she interfered in everything.”

“I only transferred money and offered help,” I said.

“You made everyone feel that this wedding was yours.”

“And therefore you wrote lies in my name?”

“You were not needed there anyway.”

These words proved more painful than any accusation. For several seconds I heard only the disappointment accumulated in my heart.

Emiliano stood up.

“Valeria, I… did not know.”

“You did not know, but you believed.”

“April told me that you threatened her.”

“Did you ask me even once whether it was true?”

Emiliano could not answer.

Nikoloz took out a second document.

“This is a bank statement. Three hundred and twenty thousand pesos were transferred from Valeria’s account directly for the reservation of the estate. The transfer says: ‘For the wedding venue, as a gift.’”

My father muttered awkwardly:

“A gift is not returned.”

“I did not ask for it to be returned,” I answered. “I only wanted them not to hide the truth.”

April took a phone from her bag.

“You are all on her side.”

“No,” my mother said, her voice breaking. “I simply see now what you did.”

April looked at her.

“You helped me too.”

Everyone in the room fell silent.

My mother gripped the chair.

“I only wanted the wedding not to be ruined.”

“You ruined not the wedding, but your daughter’s life,” Mateo said, standing by the door.

Emiliano stepped back from April.

“All this is over.”

April laughed bitterly.

“Now you are leaving me, when you have already received the money and the name?”

“I received nothing from you.”

“You received a wedding that she paid for.”

This time Emiliano lowered his eyes.

Nikoloz closed the folder.

“Valeria, there is one more thing you must know. April did not only create fake correspondence in your name. She sent the estate a letter as if you were demanding the cancellation of the reservation and a refund. If they did not pay us, she threatened that she would file a lawsuit against you.”

“What?”

“She wanted you ultimately to be blamed for ruining the wedding.”

April cried out:

“It was only for self-defense!”

“No,” I said. “It was a plan.”

At that moment my phone rang. The lawyer’s number appeared on the screen.

“Valeria, I must speak with you immediately,” he told me. “The estate owner has received a new letter. Someone used your signature and officially demanded a refund.”

April lost color.

“What letter?” Emiliano asked.

I could still hear the lawyer’s voice.

“The letter says that you yourself falsified the transfer and that the money was used illegally for the wedding. If you consider this document genuine, the matter will reach the police.”

Everyone’s eyes turned toward me.

And I understood that April was no longer interested in the truth. She had only one last way left to make me be blamed for everything again.

Nikoloz saw my frightened face and quietly said to me:

“Do not be afraid. This letter also reached us. And this time the camera recorded everything.”

But before the recording could be played, my phone rang once more. The message was from the estate administration.

“We are already waiting for the police. They say that you filed the complaint.”…