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.

---

PART 5 — THE NUMBER

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

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.

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.