My eighteen-year-old brother reached for one piece of chicken at dinner, and my mother-in-law slapped him so hard his fork hit the plate. “You greedy little freeloader!” she screamed. My husband didn’t defend him. He looked at me and said, “Don’t make this worse.” Four years of keeping the peace ended right there—because Diane still believed she was standing in her son’s house.

Then he looked at me.

“Claire,” Ethan said quietly, “don’t make this worse.”

That sentence did something the slap itself had not.

For four years, I had been the person who was expected to keep the peace.

That night, I stopped.

Noah’s cheek was already turning red.

He stared down at his plate, mortified, as if he had done something wrong.

He hadn’t.

I had made roast chicken because it was his favorite.

When we were kids, Noah used to call it “Sunday chicken” because Mom made it most weekends when Dad was home. Even after I moved out, whenever I visited my parents, Mom would ask Noah what he wanted for dinner and he would almost always say the same thing.

Roast chicken.

Mashed potatoes.

Gravy.

Nothing fancy.

Just home.

I was ten years older than Noah, and by the time he was eight, I already felt less like his sister and more like a second mother.