“It’s all so dangerous, isn’t it?” Julien asked.

“Dad.”

“Sorry. I said I wouldn’t, and then I brought it up,” he said.

I took one chair. Irene sat across from me, with Julien beside her.

Kenzie didn’t sit, instead picking up her plate.

“Kenzie?” I asked.

“Do me a favor? Don’t make a big deal of it?”

“Of—?”

She took her dad’s plate, and set it where hers had been. Her own plate went in front of her dad.

His expression changed. Solemn and grim both.

“Eat your own dinner,” her mother said.

Kenzie marched around her dad, situating herself between both parents, and picked up her dad’s plate. She deposited most of the contents on her mom’s plate, with pasta, sausage, and red sauce spilling over onto her mother’s lap.

Her mom pulled her hands away, her face screwing up for a moment before she forced it back to something almost normal. She didn’t touch or wipe at the food.

“Kenzie,” I said, standing.

“Sit. Please. It’s just family weirdness, okay?”

“This doesn’t seem okay at all. What’s going on?”

The fork scraped against the plate as she distributed food and stirred it up. Her meal was mixed into her mom’s, some of her mom’s meal shoveled onto her father’s plate. There was a fair bit of mess.

Irene started to stand, getting in my way of getting to Kenzie in the process. Kenzie almost yipped out, a “No.” There wasn’t a better word for the tone.

“You shouldn’t tell us what to do,” Irene said. She grew more incensed, impassioned. Her fingers gripped the table’s edge. “You need to eat your own dinner.”

“It’s done. It’s not worth fighting, ’rene,” Julien said. He looked almost defeated. He touched his wife’s arm, and she stopped. He stroked it, and she sat down, still clearly seething.

Not that Julien was calm. His jaw was tense.

Kenzie scraped more, metal on ceramic, before setting the plates in position.

I rounded the table. I took hold of Kenzie’s wrist before she could do more. “Stop.”

Kenzie looked at me and shot me a grin, “Just—they weren’t supposed to embarrass me tonight. They were supposed to be normal and this was supposed to be nice.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She reached into her pocket for her phone, hitting a button before tossing it to me. “Caught ’em. Always do.”

It was a camera feed. It showed kitchen. I walked into the camera’s zone, where pasta and sauce had been prepared, then looked for the camera’s source.

The face of one cabinet, painted blue, no bumps, no dots, no markings. It was smooth to the touch.

“Then eat what you were going to serve me,” Kenzie said. “You can get up from the table when you’ve eaten it or when Victoria’s left.”