There’s a corpse of a cake blackened to a crisp, the remains stinking up the house to high heaven.

The kitchen is a mess of flour and dried-up dough clumps coating every imaginable corner. The puddles of milk are still dripping off the edge of the kitchen island, and the broken porcelain fragments are in a pile on the floor. Ben is the sweaty, gin-soaked mess on the couch, his bruised left eye buried in the cushions. His little brother Jonas is face down on the hardwood floor. The cinnamon spice candles had burned through the night, only they’ve made the putrid burning smell in the kitchen far worse than yesterday. 

Somehow, it took less than 24 hours to reach this new level of low.

24 Hours Earlier

“It doesn’t look done.” Ben leaned over the island, sniffing at the apple cake she’d just taken out of the oven. Caroline used the back of her hand to push back the hair in her eyes, the other hand is powdery white and sticky from kneading dough all morning. “Oh God,” he reels back in disgust, pulling back. “No way I’m eating that.”

“This isn’t helping!” Her elbows were soaking in the sticky batter on the counter, and she didn’t care. She tried sticking the cake’s center with 20 different toothpicks. Even the knife came out covered in white, wet blobs. The edges were burned solid but somehow the cake’s insides are as gooey as it’d been an hour ago. Ben kissed her on her forehead, laughing all the way back to the couch.

The pressure was rising fast, and she was drowning in it.

All the faults kept stacking against her. The boxes that fell off the top shelf in the closet, breaking the small red reindeer ornaments into sharp glass pieces. The Christmas decorations haphazardly strewn around the living room the night before, as she only just realized Maria would be stopping by. All she could find were some strands of vintage ’70s blue tinsel, a mangled manger set with a missing Jesus, and other cheap pieces she’d inherited from her parents or bought at a garage sale.

The porcelain tea set with cherry blossoms, a wedding gift from Ben’s twin sister Emma, shattered against the floor this morning. The peppermint candy canes she forgot to pick up at the store. And her latest offense, the apple cake incident (and there was also the first cake she dumped down the sink earlier, which instead of being too sticky was too hard).

The Bancroft Family Christmas had been a spectacle over the past few years, because of Emma. Everyone knew the former Miss Missouri and her family home on the front cover of Redmontonian Magazine, and all the subsequent TV interviews promoting her newest charity, Save the Children or something like it. Caroline had been overeager to prove herself worthy to the challenge, since it was her first big holiday since their wedding. To put it lightly, the idea of breaking tradition and hosting the big day at Caroline’s house had been laughable, but she fought hard to play any role.

As she had hoped, she was invited to the table alongside the rest of the Bancroft women who meticulously planned out Christmas, every detail, in early October. It was the first time she’d been to her mother-in-law’s house, deep in Richmond Heights, an immaculate neighborhood of cookie-cutter mansions that lit up the entire night sky with a million twinkly lights.

It was still beyond her imagination, thinking about Ben’s life here, with the Martha Stewart dining room made for 20, filled with crystal china and European figurines, and the grand piano at the center of the living room. The tall ceilings created an echo, and when the grandfather clock rang at each hour, the sound bounced on the walls and up the stairs. She held her breath, walked tenderly in each step, afraid she’d sneeze and this house of glass would tumble down.

There she was given three simple tasks for the big day: the apple cake, peppermint candy canes, and stocking presents for the kids.

And now it was all going up in flames.

There’s hitting bottom, and then there’s Caroline, digging around her sister-in-law’s front porch for the hideaway key.

Emma was still not back home. After they’d argued over the olive tree, it made sense that there was only one thing left to do. So here she was, squatting on Emma’s front porch, turning over every plant and large rock she could find.

The next-door neighbor had a crowd of guests arriving. She could feel their eyes on her, but she had no shame. Finally when she had the key in her hand, she pushed her way inside. There wasn’t a sound throughout the house, just a white Persian cat wandering up the staircase. There it was, a fully sprouting olive tree in the foyer. She wasted no time running out the front door, the pot wedged under her arm.

At a few minutes past three o’clock, the snow was coming down heavy. Caroline spotted a flash of red and blue lights at the end of her street. She threw her car in park at the curb, curious to find out what was happening. With her purse and olive tree in her arms, she stood frozen in the yard, not far from two bloody-faced men who were sitting in the snow.

Ben was yelling and gesturing his arms in a violent rage, and one of the officers slammed his face down on the patrol car. Their neighbor John, he was flat on his back.

“What’s going on?” Caroline shouted a few times, but no one paid her a glance. “What are you doing!”

A black Escalade pulled up slowly, the tires squeaked into a fast stop. Her mother-in-law stood behind her with a look that burned right through her.