His eyes darted away. "Impossible. You definitely heard wrong."

"Not while I'm around. Yvonne would never do something like that."

"Just put the bowl away, Mom."

He fumbled to close up the containers I'd opened, terrified I'd force him to eat from the dog bowl again.

"Mom, Yvonne is just a germaphobe. She doesn't mean any harm."

I let out a cold laugh. "She already made me eat out of a dog bowl. And you call that no harm?"

"Didn't she also say that if there's a next time, it won't be this simple?"

"Tell me, Cary. Next time I come over for a meal, is she going to cook my rice with water from the toilet?"

One question after another, and he had no answer for any of them.

But he still refused to admit it.

I pointed at the plastic sheeting on the passenger seat, still crackling under me.

"If she doesn't look down on me, then what is all this?"

Cary stammered. "She's a germaphobe. I mean, you were at the hospital. There are germs there. She's just being cautious."

I pointed at the driver's seat. Then at the back row.

"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."