For four years my husband’s family called me the walking credit card and ordered lobster every time I was at the table. At my father-in-law’s birthday dinner I smiled, let all nineteen of them order, and then a waiter came out carrying a tray of nineteen separate checks.

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Nobody in that family knew. She has a redundancy story that ran out two years ago and a partner who moved out in the January, and she has been the loudest person at every one of those tables for two years.

The joke was not only greed. For at least one person it was cover.

I paid the three of them. Quietly, at the desk, on the way out, and I have never mentioned it to any of them and I am only putting it here because it is the true shape of that evening.
PART 5 — THE NUMBER

Here is what came out over the following two months, and it is the part that actually ended something.

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In the October of 2021, at a table, somebody asked Torren what I did.

And my husband, who was thirty-four and sitting with six siblings who have always slightly measured him, said a number.

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He inflated it. Not enormously. He said I was on about double what I am actually on.

He has admitted this. He admitted it in a kitchen in the November after a very long evening, and he said he did it once, in one sentence, without thinking, and that by the time he might have corrected it there was no way to.

Four years of lobster came out of one sentence at a table in 2021.

That is not an excuse for nineteen adults and I have never once let him use it as one. They are grown people and none of them ever put a hand out.

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But it is where the belief came from, and the person who put it there was the one sitting next to me doing the small apologetic face.

We are still married. We did eight months of counselling and he is not the same about his family and it cost him a great deal to get there.

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There have been eleven family dinners since. Everybody pays for themselves now, every time, and it was never discussed once. It simply started happening.

The restaurants have changed. Nobody has suggested The Lantern House again.

Briar and I are, unexpectedly, all right. She rang me in the February, about four months after, and did not apologise and instead asked me whether I knew anybody in operations, and I did, and she has been working since the May.