If you are missing a single one, pack your bags and get out of my house!”

And then, following it, unmistakable and chilling in the silent room: the heavy, metallic click of the deadbolt turning in the lock.

The sound of a man locking his wife into a kitchen.

No one moved.

No one breathed.

And then I watched the faces of the assembled Vance relatives — the aunts and uncles and cousins who had spent the afternoon toasting Fiona and sneering at the absent servant girl — change, one by one, into expressions of disgust, and shame, and the specific hot discomfort of people who have just been forced to see something about their own family that they had all been very carefully agreeing not to see.