I had swapped the slideshow file two days earlier, when Brandon asked me to “handle the tech stuff” for the party, the same way he handed me every task he considered beneath him. He never checked it. Why would he? So the first slide that lit up every screen in that elegant restaurant was not a baby photo of Gerald. It was a screenshot of Brandon’s own text messages, sent to dozens of relatives, bragging that he was personally paying for the entire seventieth birthday celebration. Beneath it, in plain black letters, sat a single line I had typed: “Every dollar of tonight came from my account. Not his.”

The room, already quiet from Patricia’s cruelty, went utterly silent as the guests read it. Then the slide changed on its own, to the receipt. The full amount for the venue, the catering, the shrimp platters they’d refused my daughters, all charged to my business account. Brandon lunged for the projector remote, but the slides kept advancing, each one another invoice, another message where he’d taken credit for money that was mine. Patricia’s face drained of color. Gerald, the birthday man himself, stared at the screen, then at his son, then at me standing calmly by the door with my two daughters. And then the final slide appeared, the one document I had been saving, and even Brandon stopped moving when he saw what it was.