Dinner Sunday at the Catch, who’s in.

I had muted the chat by then, but Derek showed me the replies later, and the replies were an education.

People will tell you exactly who they are if you stop paying for their silence, and the messages that came in over the following days were a tidy, unsolicited confession of what my role in the family had always actually been.

His brother wrote back that he couldn’t make it, he was still paying off his portion of Dad’s birthday.