Calculated Moves

VANESSA

Dinner was quiet—too quiet. The kind of quiet that made the air feel heavy, like an unspoken tension lingering just beneath the surface. The only sound in the dining room was the soft clinking of silverware against porcelain, the occasional scrape of a knife cutting through meat, the delicate tapping of my mother’s fork against the rim of her plate.

My father sat at the head of the table,