**PART 1**
The notification from Marcus had popped up on my phone at 4:12 that afternoon while I was sitting in the driveway of our little townhouse, waiting for the engine to cool down so the radiator would stop hissing. It was just a quick reminder about his mother’s dinner party. Just a casual Sunday evening get-together to mark our first full year of marriage. We had been through a lot in that first twelve months, balancing our different backgrounds, our families, and the quiet rhythm of building a life together in a city that felt half the time like it didn’t want us there.
I had met Eleanor and Arthur a handful of times before at neutral spots like restaurants or brief holiday visits, but an evening inside their house was different. It meant stepping onto ground they owned.
Marcus looked handsome when he opened the passenger door, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms and his hair still damp from a quick shower. He smiled that easy, crooked smile that had won me over back at the university library four years ago.
“You ready for this?” he asked, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “Mom said she spent all day trying out a new recipe for us.”
“I was born ready,” I told him, though my stomach gave a small, nervous twitch that I blamed on the black coffee I’d had for lunch.
The drive out to their neighborhood took twenty minutes through streets lined with heavy oak trees that dropped damp leaves onto the asphalt.
Eleanor and Arthur lived in a brick house with manicured boxwood hedges and a heavy oak front door that always seemed to click shut a little too securely behind you. When Eleanor opened it, she smelled faintly of lemon furniture polish and expensive vanilla. She pulled Marcus into a tight, lingering embrace, her fingers splayed across his broad back, before turning to me with a smile that never quite reached the corners of her eyes.
“You look thin, Maya,” she said, her hand resting briefly on my shoulder with a weight that felt less like affection and more like an inspection. “Come inside. The kitchen is a bit of a disaster, but we’re managing.”
Arthur was sitting in his usual spot by the brick fireplace, nodding a greeting from behind his glasses while a local news broadcast played quietly on the wall-mounted television. The air inside smelled rich and heavy, thick with the scent of garlic, toasted sesame oil, and something sharp and fermented that clung to the back of the throat.
Marcus went to help his father with a stack of mail on the side table, and Eleanor crooked a finger at me, inviting me to follow her down the short hallway toward the back of the house.
“I could use an extra set of hands getting the platters out,” she said over her shoulder.
The kitchen was spotless except for the stove, where a large cast-iron Dutch oven sat bubbling away with a dark, reddish-brown broth. That was when I saw it. Tucked down deep into the recycling bin beside the sink was a crumpled, bright blue plastic tub with lettering I recognized from the Asian market downtown. It was shrimp paste. Beside it sat a small plastic bag filled with dried whole prawns, their little black eyes staring up from the translucent plastic.
My chest tightened. Months earlier, right after Marcus and I announced our engagement, we had sat at a diner booth with both of his parents and gone over my medical history with the care of a military briefing.
I carry a severe, anaphylactic allergy to crustaceans. A single drop of shrimp extract or crab protein will close my throat within minutes, sending me straight to the emergency room with an epinephrine pen in my thigh. Marcus had typed it all out in a group chat later that week, and Eleanor had replied with a polite, rolling thumbs-up emoji.
Now, standing in the bright fluorescent light of her immaculate kitchen, looking at the empty packaging discarded under a pile of junk mail, the silence in the room felt heavy and loud.
Eleanor didn’t turn around right away. She kept stirring the bubbling broth with a long wooden spoon, her shoulders squared beneath her beige cardigan.
“Everything alright back there, dear?” she asked, her voice light and musical.
“Everything is fine,” I said carefully, my voice dropping an octave into that steady, low register my grandmother always used when she knew someone was testing her patience.
I picked up a stack of heavy ceramic dinner plates from the counter and carried them out to the dining room table without saying another word. The dining table was long, polished dark walnut, surrounded by high-backed chairs that made you sit up straight whether you wanted to or not. Marcus was already there, laughing at something his father had said about the local zoning board. I set the plates down one by one, each of them clicking softly against the placemats.
