Chapter 1: The Easter Sacrifice

The annual Easter dinner at the Carter family estate was never a celebration. It was a theatrical production — directed, starring, and reviewed by my mother, Barbara Carter.

The sprawling dining room, with its vaulted ceilings and velvet drapes, was set for fifty guests. The air smelled of roasted lamb and rosemary — and the quiet anxiety of relatives trying not to step on one of my mother’s social landmines.

I was twenty-three years old, seated at the far end of what my family still called the “kids’ table.” A humiliating designation, considering I was technically an adult — though in the family narrative, I was merely the college dropout.

I sat wedged between my four-year-old nephew, who was gleefully crushing a dinner roll into paste, and Great-Aunt Mildred, who was deaf and kept loudly asking whether I had found a husband yet.

I wore a simple navy dress I had bought at a thrift store for twelve dollars. It was clean, pressed, and completely invisible beside the designer labels draped over every other woman in the room. I kept my head down and cut my ham into precise, perfect squares, trying to shrink into the mahogany paneling.