I had honored the letter of Julian’s command down to the last tray, and in doing so I would expose, in front of everyone whose respect they cared about, what their demand for a sixty-course heritage feast had always really been: not a celebration, but a display of power over a woman they had decided they owned.

They had wanted to watch me labor and fail.

Instead, they were going to watch sixty frozen dinners cascade across a hardwood floor, and understand, all at once and far too late, that the labor and the failure had never been mine.

Because that, underneath the theater of it, was the true message of the frozen dinners, and the reason I chose them over every quieter revenge available to me.

The demand for a sixty-course heritage feast had never really been about food.

No one actually needs sixty distinct dishes; no one could eat them; the number was absurd on its face, and that absurdity was the point.