Either way, it was a mistake, the first real mistake I had ever seen her make, because a cruelty you can hold in your hand is a cruelty that can finally be answered.

Chapter 8 — The Room Goes Silent

For several seconds, the happy Christmas noise simply evaporated out of the room, the way sound drops away right before something breaks.

A silver fork stopped, halfway to my brother-in-law’s mouth, and hung there in the air.

One of the teenage cousins stared very intently down at the dining room carpet, as though the individual fibers had suddenly become the most fascinating thing in the world, unwilling to look up and be caught seeing what everyone had seen.

Even the family’s old golden retriever, who had spent the morning hopefully patrolling under the table for dropped crumbs, backed slowly away from the table legs, in that uncanny way animals have of sensing tension in a room.