“We’re family, Mari,” Daniel would say.

“Someday, they’d do the same for us.” And I had believed him, or made myself believe him, because I wanted it to be true, because I wanted to belong to a family, because I had married into these people hoping to be one of them.

And now I sat at their table, hungry, in front of an empty plate they had handed me as a punishment, watching them enjoy a feast I had, in every way that counted, purchased, and I understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once and did not leave, the answer to the question my husband’s spell had never let me ask.

Someday, would they do the same for me?