And Bryce, standing in the middle of his celebrating family, let the bouquet slip out of his hand.

It hit the floor with a soft sound that, he said, was the loudest thing in the room.

He told me, much later, in one of the calls where he was still trying to make me understand what that day had cost him, that the part he couldn’t shake was his mother’s face.

Teresa had spent months as the loudest celebrant of the coming heir — the flowers, the phone calls to friends, the whole performance of a grandmother restored.

And in the space of one sentence from a doctor, he watched her turn on the girl she’d been fussing over, watched the warmth go out of her like a light switched off, and understood that his mother’s love had never been for Camila at all.