After I paid $77,000 for my brother’s wedding, he sent me to the wrong city in Italy “as a joke.” I landed in Naples while they were celebrating in Florence. The next morning, he texted: “LOL, I just didn’t want you there.” My mother added, “This is your fault.” I didn’t argue. I smiled… and sent her a gift—four feet tall, delivered by courier. She called me in tears: “Can I please pay you back?”

Part 1

My name is Alyssa Monroe. I’m twenty-five, and the first time my brother ruined me in public, I was seven years old and wearing a paper crown from Burger King.

He told our cousins I’d wet my pants at school. I hadn’t. I was holding a cardboard cup of orange soda with both hands, the ice clinking against the sides, when everyone at the table looked at me and laughed anyway. My mother laughed too. Not hard, not with her whole chest. Just enough to let me know which side she was on.

At twenty-five, I should’ve known better than to think Italy would be different.

Naples hit me first through smell. Hot oil. Salt. Diesel. Dough frying somewhere nearby. Not the soft, chilled floral air I’d pictured around a wedding hotel in Florence. Not white roses and champagne and candle wax. This air had teeth. It curled into my silk dress and made me feel overdressed, misplaced, ridiculous.

The taxi driver had already pulled away by the time I noticed the hotel awning wasn’t the one from the Pinterest board I’d spent three months helping my brother’s fiancée put together. No gold crest. No marble lions. No staff in cream uniforms. Just a sun-faded sign, a chipped planter with a dead fern in it, and a teenage bellboy smoking beside the entrance with his tie hanging loose.

I stood on the curb with my suitcase handle digging into my palm.

“Scusi,” I said to the girl at the front desk a minute later, trying not to sound panicked. “I’m here for the Hawthorne-Vale wedding party?”

She blinked. “No wedding here.”

My stomach went cold so fast it almost felt clean.

I pulled up the itinerary email, the one my brother had forwarded with a careless “You’re a lifesaver, Lyss, handle this?” tone that had followed me my whole life. The confirmation was there. Hotel Santa Lucia. Naples. Check-in for Friday. Wedding weekend.

Except the wedding website still said Florence. The venue still said Villa Bellarosa, Florence Hills. Welcome dinner, Florence. Ceremony, Florence. Brunch, Florence.

I checked the train times with shaking fingers. Two hours and fifty-eight minutes if I caught one in forty minutes. Longer with luggage. Longer in heels. Longer in humiliation.

I called my brother first.

He didn’t answer.

I called again.

Straight to voicemail.

Then my phone lit up with a text.

LOL, didn’t want to invite you.

I stared at the screen so long the words stopped looking like language.