The place card came the morning after, after a whole day of the family’s stiff silence, after she had surely felt, even through her armor, that this year something had landed wrong.

A person with any capacity for self-correction, feeling that, would have course-corrected — would have made the Boxing Day brunch the place where she quietly overcompensated, seated Holly in a place of honor, called her by her name for once.

Gene did the opposite.

She sat down with her pen, the morning after humiliating a seven-year-old, and she looked at the stack of place cards, and she made the deliberate choice to do it again, worse, in writing, in capital letters.

GUEST.