My mother-in-law clenched her napkin.
“Don’t make a scene, Helena,” she said, using my name like a warning. “It’s Christmas.”
“I’m being polite,” I answered. “You started the introductions.”
James tried to intervene, his voice low.
“Mom, please…”
But Diane cut him off with a commanding look.
“James needs a suitable woman. And you…” she looked me up and down as if I were a faulty purchase, “you’ve been an expensive experiment.”
That sentence hit harder than the first. An experiment. After seven years of marriage, of moves, of dinners with his friends, of forced smiles to fit into his family.
I kept spreading butter, slow and deliberate. And while the carol continued to play like a mockery, I realized something that steadied me inside: they hadn’t brought Emma just to humiliate me. They had come to push me into a mistake, a scream, a reaction they could use.
I looked up at James.
“Are you going to say something, or are you going to let your mother arrange your divorce at the table?”
James opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Emma took a deep breath, as if preparing herself.
And I knew the night was only just beginning.
James set his fork down on the plate with excessive care, as though the sound might shatter the ice. He looked at me, then at his mother, then at Emma. His face belonged to a man trapped between two versions of himself: the obedient son and the husband who once promised “forever” when it still suited him.
“This… wasn’t like that,” he stammered.
Diane smiled without showing her teeth.
“Oh? Then explain it, sweetheart.”
Emma leaned slightly toward James with practiced delicacy.
