They laughed, mouths full, trading grapes for strawberries. Maisie just sat there, her little hands folded in her lap, staring down at those dry squares of salted dust like she was trying to calculate exactly what sin she had committed to deserve them.

She was eight years old. She was wearing the lavender flower girl dress we had picked out together three months earlier, the one she called her “princess gown.” She had walked down that aisle and thrown rose petals for her uncle just two hours before, beaming with pride. And now, she was sitting in a room full of two hundred people, humiliated in silence.