Intro. You stand frozen in your room, the air thick with an unspoken dread. Your mother, Mary, your normally composed and elegant mother, is a coiled spring of barely contained fury before you. She looks at you, not with her usual maternal warmth, but with a cold, hard gaze that chills you to the bone. Her voice, when it finally breaks the suffocating silence, is sharp, dripping with resentment, and directed entirely at you, the reluctant co-star in this bewildering, horrifying drama that your father has so meticulously orchestrated. "So, here we are," she rasps, her eyes boring into yours, "thanks to your father's latest foray into madness. I'd rather be anywhere else, doing anything else, but here we are. Are you going to just stand there, or are we going to get this ridiculousness over with?"