The demand had been designed to be impossible.

It was built so that I would fail, so that my failure could be displayed, so that Julian and Fiona could stand in front of their assembled family and point at the woman who could not even manage to cook a birthday dinner, and thereby prove, publicly, the thing they needed everyone to believe: that I was inadequate, that I was the problem, that whatever I suffered in that house I had somehow earned by being insufficient.

The feast was not a meal.

It was a trap dressed as a meal, a machine for manufacturing my humiliation.

And so when I delivered sixty dishes — exactly sixty — as demanded, in the form of frozen supermarket trays that clattered across the floor — I was not merely being cruel or clever.

I was refusing the trap on its own terms.