My Son and His Wife Took Their Son on a $20K Cruise, Leaving Their Daughter Home — By Noon, I Was Standing at Their Table

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Chapter 16

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She was staring up at the ship, her mouth open. ‘Is that where they are, Grandpa?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is where they are. Are we going to yell at them? No, I said taking her hand and walking toward the gangway. We are not going to yell. Yelling is for people who do not have a plan. We are going to teach them a lesson.

We stepped onto the metal ramp. The sound of our footsteps on the steel was heavy and final. We were boarding the enemy vessel. The hunt was over. The ambush was about to begin. The dining hall on deck 15 was a cathedral of gluttony. It was called the Windjammer marketplace, but it looked more like a Roman orgy reimagined by a corporate accountant.

The air was thick with the smell of melted butter garlic roasting meat and the sugary chemical tang of artificial tropical punches. It was a sensory assault. Everywhere I looked, there were mountains of food, pyramids of chilled shrimp glistening under the halogen lights, carving stations where prime rib was sliced into thick slabs by men in tall white hats, towers of desserts that defied gravity.

I held Mia’s hand as we navigated through the maze of tables. She was walking with a limp, not because she was injured, but because she was overwhelmed. Her eyes darted from the overflowing plates of strangers to the floor. She had spent the last two days rationing a loaf of moldy bread, and now she was walking through a room where people were throwing away halfeaten steaks because they were too full to finish them. The waste was obscene.

It was a physical manifestation of the entitlement that had almost killed my granddaughter. I scanned the room. It was crowded, but finding them was not difficult. You just had to look for the center of attention. Or at least the people who were desperately trying to be the center of attention. I saw the ring light first.

It was a small portable halo of white LED light clamped onto the edge of a table near the floor to ceiling windows. The best seat in the house, naturally. The light was pointed directly at a woman with perfectly quafted blonde hair and a white linen dress that probably cost more than my truck. Monica. She was holding a glass of rose wine in one hand and gesturing with the other, talking animatedly to her phone screen.

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