"No."
Harrison blinked. "Mom—"
"No apology. No twenty-five hundred dollars. Your wife destroyed a birthday cake I paid for, in front of people I love, and smirked about it. I answered her in the dialect she speaks. That is the end of the financial conversation."
Sloan's voice rose, bright and sharp.
"That bag cost—"
"Then your husband can buy you another one with his own money," I said. "Not with mine. Not with an apology extracted from a woman in her own kitchen on the morning after her sixty-fifth birthday."
Harrison's jaw worked. For a moment I saw him choosing between the mother who had raised him and the wife who had rearranged him, and I saw, with a clarity that hurt, which way the choosing leaned.