My friend invited eight of us to her country house for her birthday, then handed us an outrageous bill the next morning. We thought the surprise charge was bad enough, until we started checking the spreadsheet line by line.
“I’m not counting myself in it, obviously, since it’s my birthday.”
My friend Dani said that while eight of us stared at the spreadsheet she’d just opened at the breakfast table.
At the bottom, in bold, was a number.
€1,160.
“That’s €145 each,” she said. “I’ll send my card details to the group chat. If everyone could transfer today, before people start driving off and forgetting, that’d be great.”
Nobody reached for a phone.
Tom slowly put his fork down.
“But Dani. You told us everything was covered.”
“I said everything was sorted.”
“You said bring wine.”
“Yes, because I organized everything else. Do you think this weekend just appeared by itself?”
Her family’s country house was two hours outside the city, beside a lake so cold we’d spent most of Friday daring each other to stay in longer than 30 seconds.
Dani had invited us three months earlier for her 35th birthday.
Friday to Sunday.
“Bring wine. Everything else is sorted.”
So we’d brought wine.
Mel had spent hours baking Dani’s birthday cake.
Tom brought beer and a speaker.
Karo had driven four hours with her two-year-old because she refused to miss Dani’s birthday.
I’d brought a bottle of gin Dani liked and a framed photograph of the two of us from university.
Friday night had been perfect.
We grilled outside, swam, drank too much wine, and sang happy birthday on the deck at 11 with sparklers stuck in Mel’s cake.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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