Chapter 4 - The VideoThe voice belonged to my cousin, Priyanka, twenty-six years old, holding her phone up with the particular, unbothered confidence of someone who films everything at every family event as a matter of habit and had, this once, filmed something that actually mattered.
"I was getting content for the wedding hashtag," she said, a little sheepishly, "and then — well. I kept filming."
She turned the phone around. Even from several feet away, I could see the footage playing on her screen — my father's hands on my shoulders, the shove that "barely touched me," my fall, the applause. Four hundred people had, apparently, needed to see it captured and replayed before understanding what they'd actually just laughed at.
Victor's face went through several colors in quick succession. "That's — you can't just go around filming people without—"
"It's a wedding, Victor," Rhys said, and something in the way he used my father's first name instead of any title landed harder than shouting would have. "Four hundred people were already filming everything tonight. You just happened to be the one who gave them something worth keeping."
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My mother reached for my arm. "Evelyn, sweetheart, I'm sure your father didn't mean—"
"He meant it," I said, and I was surprised at how calm the sentence came out, how much lighter it felt to finally say the thing I'd spent thirty-two years swallowing at every family dinner. "He's meant every single version of it, for thirty-two years. Tonight he just finally did it somewhere with four hundred witnesses and a phone recording, instead of somewhere quiet where I was the only one who'd remember it."
