It has been sixteen months. Laney and Brandon divorced six months after her birthday. Caleb dumped her three weeks after the story went around. Her job let her go in March, for reasons officially unrelated but, according to Marlene, really related. Laney moved back to Indiana, where her mother lives. She has not tried to contact me. I have not contacted her. Marlene and I have become close, which is its own strange development. I have been asked, by multiple people who were at that dinner, whether I regret what I did. I will tell you the same thing I have told them. I do not regret it. I think about the mastectomy toast sometimes. I think about how I laughed that night, and how I drove home shaking, and how for a full year I carried the humiliation of that night like a stone in my pocket. I think Laney gave me a gift that night, actually. She showed me who she was. And a year later, in front of the same forty people, I gave her the gift of showing her who I was too. So tell me honestly — was waiting a full year to return the favor poetic justice, or was what I did at that birthday crueler than what she did to me?

* Story inspired by real-life situations. Names and details have been changed for privacy.