It got easier.

It always does, once you learn that the weather cannot actually touch you if you simply decline to go out into it.

Chapter 16 — When the Subsidy Stopped

Here is the thing I had not fully predicted, and the thing that taught me the most about what the family had actually been.

Without my card quietly absorbing the cost of their appetites, the family’s whole social life began, very quickly, to come apart, and it came apart in a way that revealed it had never really been held together by what they claimed held it together.

Two weeks after the birthday, my sister-in-law tried to organize another gathering, at a high-end seafood place, posting the invitation to the group chat with her usual flourish.