For one suspended second, nobody moved.
Not my husband.
Not my stepdaughter.
Not my father-in-law.
Not even my friends, who stood in the middle of my dining room with half-finished glasses of white wine in their hands, frozen in the kind of stunned silence that only follows something so ugly and so unexpected that the brain refuses to process it at first.
My mother-in-law, Linda Whitmore, kept her hand raised for a beat too long, as if some part of her expected applause.
Then she lowered it, stepped closer, and said in a low, vicious voice, “Don’t you dare say anything to her again, or next time it won’t be just the slap.”
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