Grover was gray.

And at the center of it all, my mother-in-law stood with her painted lips pressed white, and my wife sat with her face in her hands, and my father-in-law held a phone that had just told him his whole family was a lie.

This was the head table they’d been so determined to keep pure.

This was the family my children weren’t good enough to sit with.

I felt no triumph looking at them — I want to be clear about that, because it’s the truth — but I did feel one clean thing, the first clean thing I’d felt in that family in years: I was no longer afraid of them.

The spell was broken.