Fabiola had a feeling this was going to happen, and she was very satisfied with her decision to get something strong in her before dinner. Fausto refused to drink at all, so they respected his wishes and usually kept their finer whey wine in the pantry on his dinner visits. All the better, too, because with how things were looking, she didn’t even want to consider her belligerent son with a drink.

Family dinners were never a big success in the Freitag family. When she, Fausto, and their littlest brother were her sons’ age, they’d bicker at each other until dinner was reliably ruined. Every sit-down dinner concluded with someone losing their temper. Fabiola didn’t expect tonight to be much different, though she hoped everyone would go easy on Georgie. She was just a guest, after all.