Twenty minutes later my phone rang again, and it was Brenda, incandescent, accusing me of sabotaging her son’s career, of failing my duties as a wife, of destroying the family over nothing.

“If you won’t come back, then fine,” she snapped.

“I will go over there myself, set the whole place up, and cook the meal with my own hands.

And we will simply tell Martin that you are away visiting family out of state, so that no one has to find out what kind of wife you really are.” And it was there, listening to my mother-in-law calmly arrange to erase me from my own home and paper over the truth with a lie, that I understood exactly what I was going to do.

I was not going to cook that dinner.