I want to be precise about that, because the story gets told sometimes as revenge, and it was not revenge; it was subtraction, the quiet removal of a subsidy that everyone had mistaken for a law of nature.

The manager said, of course, ma’am, entirely unbothered, because to him it was the most normal instruction in the world, a party member settling her own portion and the host of the celebration covering the rest, which is how it is supposed to work, which is how it works at every birthday dinner in the country that is not quietly built on one person’s silent subsidy.

I thanked him.

And I walked past the front doors and out into the crisp night air, and I pulled out my phone and called a car, and while I waited for it I checked my watch, the way I check everything, and did the timing in my head.