That was how she chose to do it.
Not quietly. Not privately. Not with even the smallest attempt at dignity.
She waited until everyone was seated, until the food was passed around, until the room was full of clinking silverware and forced laughter and the thick, familiar smell of roasted turkey. Thanksgiving dinner, the one day a year we were all expected to pretend we were a functional family, became the stage she’d clearly been rehearsing on in her head for weeks.
And when she stood at the head of the table in our dead mother’s dining room, red wine dripping from the lip of the glass she had just flung into my lap, Charlotte Hale looked less like a woman who had lost control than a woman who had finally decided the audience was big enough.
The Cabernet hit my cream sweater first, then spread hot and sticky across my chest and down into my lap.
For one second nobody moved.
My brother-in-law Grant sat with his fork halfway to his mouth. My niece Sophie froze with her napkin in her hand. Uncle Ray, my mother’s younger brother, blinked like the scene in front of him had shifted too fast for his body to keep up. My cousin Melissa stared down at her plate as if she could vanish into the mashed potatoes if she committed hard enough.
