It had begun, obligingly, to rain.

And on the wet pavement, under the gray sky, stood Julian and Fiona — surrounded by hastily filled plastic garbage bags of their clothes, and, scattered around them where the movers had set them out, sixty thawing television dinners.

They had wanted a sixty-course feast.

They had demanded it, as a display of their power over me, as proof that they owned my labor and my dignity and my life.

What I served them instead, on Fiona’s sixtieth birthday, was complete and total and irreversible destruction.

And I will not pretend to a nobility I did not feel.