Chapter 1 — Two Hundred Dollars

The notification came through at six in the morning, while I was taking my first sip of lukewarm water at the kitchen counter, and I looked at it for a long time before I understood that it was not a mistake.

My husband of eight years, Brandon, had transferred two hundred dollars into my checking account.

In the memo line he had written nothing at all, but there was no need.

I already knew what it was for.

It was for his mother’s seventieth birthday party.

For thirty guests.

Two hundred dollars, for thirty guests, read like a cruel joke — and it read that way in direct contradiction to the instruction list that had been pinned to my refrigerator for a week, in my mother-in-law’s own hand.

Rosalind had specified slow-roasted prime rib.

A stuffed pork loin.

An elaborate dessert display.

A three-tiered custom cake.

Fresh orchids.

She had underlined, twice, that the prestigious Dupont family would be in attendance, as though I might otherwise have been tempted to relax.

I did not cry.

I want you to notice that, because it surprised me at the time.

Eight years earlier, or even one year earlier, I would have felt the familiar sick lurch in my stomach, the scramble of a woman already doing the math of how to make an impossible thing possible with her own money and her own exhaustion.

That morning I felt none of it.