It was the sudden, clean refusal to keep paying.

If the family account was going to buy an eighty-dollar-a-plate celebration of my father, then it was going to buy his grandson dinner too, or it was going to buy considerably less celebration.

That was not cruelty.

That was arithmetic — the same cold arithmetic my father had used on me my whole life, turned around and pointed, for once, in the other direction.

I think that was what actually frightened them.

Not that I was angry.

That I had, at last, learned to do the math.

Chapter 6 — The Drive Home

My phone buzzed the whole way home.

I didn’t look at it until Rowan was asleep — full, happy, still talking about the soufflé as he drifted off.