The final total came to twenty-one thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars.
Six tickets, balcony cabins, premium dining, drink packages, Wi-Fi, and excursions through the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Mexico.
I paid every cent.
I even ordered matching navy shirts embroidered with Kingsford Family Cruise, picturing all of us lined up on deck for a silly photo — a photo I could frame, a photo that would finally prove, to me if to no one else, that I mattered to these people.
I am almost embarrassed, now, by how much I invested in that imagined photograph.
I had a specific version of it in my mind: the six of us at the railing at sunset, wind in everyone’s hair, my mother laughing, my father’s arm around my shoulder — his arm around mine, that was the detail I kept returning to — all of us in the matching shirts, a single frozen second that would say, once and for all, she is one of us. I ordered the shirts in the right sizes.
I paid extra to have them done in time.
I was, I can see now, not planning a vacation at all.
I was commissioning evidence.
I wanted a piece of physical proof I could hang on my wall and glance at on the hard days, something that would answer the question I had been asking my whole life in a voice I could finally believe.