The house went quiet, and everyone went to sleep, and on the surface, the day simply ended.

Beatrice, I am quite sure, went to bed that night thoroughly satisfied with herself.

In her mind, the candle and the tag had done their work and been swept quietly under the rug, the way everything she did was always swept under the rug.

The family had absorbed the insult, no one had dared to challenge her, and her authority stood as unbroken as ever.

She had no way of knowing that a small red box now sat inside a child’s beaded purse in the guest room, or what it contained, or that the balance of power in her perfectly controlled household had, that evening, quietly and completely shifted beneath her feet.