"So the virus only exists on my seat?"
He froze for a moment, stammering without managing a single coherent sentence.
"Yvonne was just being overly cautious. Don't take it personally. But I swear, she absolutely did not make you and Dad eat out of a dog bowl."
Fine. Even after I'd laid it all out like that, he still refused to admit it.
Then I had no choice but to convince him with hard evidence.
"See for yourself."
The screenshot showed a group chat. The name of the group was "Operation Takedown the Witch."
Yvonne was the group admin, and the members were her closest friends.
While Cary and I had been arguing, I'd received a WhatsApp message from an old friend of mine. Her daughter had some professional overlap with Yvonne and had been pulled into the group chat.
"The old witch insisted on eating at my place, so I served her with a dog bowl."
One short sentence, paired with a photo of me eating with my back to the camera. It earned Yvonne a flood of praise in the group.
"Go Yvonne! If the old hag doesn't understand boundaries, teach her a lesson."
The most enthusiastic cheerleader was someone I recognized: her best friend, Gloria Whitney.
Every single message Yvonne had posted was more outrageous than the last.
"She was originally planning to stay at my place this trip. I had everything ready for her, but then she didn't come."
The truth was, I had wanted to stay at my son's apartment so I could get a proper night's rest. But I worried about my husband being alone at the hospital, and I didn't want to intrude on Cary and Yvonne's space. So I'd set up a cot in the hospital corridor instead.
If my old friend hadn't forwarded those screenshots, I never would have known what Yvonne had planned for me.
"The toothbrush was scrubbed with the toilet brush. The bath mat was the slippery kind. The bedding was covered in mold."
Yvonne was showing off her handiwork to her friends. Every video beneath her messages stabbed at my eyes.
"That's impossible. This isn't real. Mom, where did you dig up all this garbage to frame Yvonne?"
"She's so kind. She would never do something like this."
Even with screenshots. Even with videos. Even though the bedding Yvonne filmed matched the bedding in the video Cary himself had sent me, frame for frame.
He still wouldn't admit it.
"I'm framing her? Cary, you know better than anyone whether she did this or not."
Cary bit down on his lip. "Yvonne wouldn't do this. And even if she did, you pushed her to it."
I stared at him. "I pushed her? How exactly did I push her?"
Cary said nothing. He just kept twisting the argument in circles. "I believe Yvonne. She wouldn't do this. Who knows where you found some random group chat to set her up."
He glanced out the window, impatient, trying to steer the conversation somewhere else entirely.
"So you don't believe the screenshots. Fine. But you recognize your mother-in-law's WhatsApp, don't you?"
I opened Effie Fox's chat window.
Five minutes ago, she'd sent me a message dripping with hostility, demanding to know why I'd gone looking for trouble by showing up at her daughter's home for dinner. Between every line, she mocked me for being served with a dog bowl, implying I'd brought it on myself.
"Janet, you've got one foot in the grave already. How dare you go disrupting my daughter's life."
"Let me tell you something. Using a dog bowl on you this time was being polite. Next time, who knows what you'll end up eating."
Yvonne's mother had been widowed young. I'd pitied her for raising a child alone and had been more than generous with the wedding gifts.
She was just like Yvonne. Sweet as sugar to your face, a viper behind your back. They'd both perfected the art.
"Look. Your mother-in-law sent this to threaten me. Are you still going to deny it? Unless you think I grabbed her phone and typed it myself?"
Cary went quiet.
"Mom, this really is your fault. If you hadn't insisted on coming over for dinner, Yvonne never would have done any of this."
