Theresa had tried to use that empty plate to remind me that I did not belong at her table.

She never understood that she was handing me the exact push I needed, at last, to stand up and walk away from it forever.

I have thought, since, about why it took an empty plate, of all things, to do what four years of quieter cruelties had not, and I believe the answer is that the empty plate was the one insult too honest to be explained away.

All the earlier cruelties had come wrapped in plausible deniability, in the language of family and love that let me keep excusing them.