“Find a hotel,” I said. Melissa went completely silent. I reminded her that I had warned her repeatedly for months that the farmhouse was sold and unavailable. She had chosen to promise someone else’s property to twenty-five guests anyway. That mistake did not become my emergency simply because the buses had finally reached the gate. Gerald gave them time to turn around, and the drivers began calling nearby hotels while Nathan frantically searched for rooms on his phone. With a wedding happening that weekend, availability was limited and expensive. For the first time, Melissa had to solve a problem without assuming I would pay to make it disappear.
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