And I had rejected the obvious ones.

I could simply have not shown up — vanished into my new freedom and left them waiting, foodless, for a banquet that never came.

But that was too quiet.

It would have let them tell the story their own way, to their thirty assembled relatives: that the crazy, ungrateful daughter-in-law had run off, that poor Julian and poor Fiona were the victims of an unstable woman.

No.

I did not want to be absent from Fiona’s jubilee.