My mother-in-law brought thirty-eight friends into my restaurant, ordered the most expensive menu on it, and told them she was paying. Then she started boasting about my husband’s new girlfriend — and I looked across the room at the young woman refilling their water.

A card on my account, with a monthly limit, for fish and vegetables.

Over the last fourteen months, eleven thousand dollars of it went on things that were not fish.

A hotel in Linmouth, four times. A jeweller on Carrick Street, twice. Two dinners at a restaurant I would not be seen dead in. And, from the May, a regular transfer of three hundred dollars a month to a personal account that my bank could not identify.

I was going to confront him with it in the September.

Then Constance leaned across a table of thirty-eight women with my bottle in her hand and told them it all came out of this place.

She knew. She had known the whole time.

She had been eating my food for free while her son spent my money on a girl, and she was proud of both.
PART 4 — THE HOSTESS

Aurelie is twenty-six and she has been front of house at Saltmarch since the January.