The place is Sydney, Australia, six weeks before Christmas. As the story opens, the narrator speculates about how innocent bystanders might weave an anecdote out of an incident of public embarrassment. The incident in question occurs when three siblings get together to celebrate their shared birthday, because they are triplets. Other people in the restaurant relate the experience from their point of view. A man on a blind date notices three servers emerge from the kitchen with three birthday cakes. An elderly woman dining with her husband watches in fascination as the birthday celebration turns into a screaming match when one of the sisters accuses the other two of ruining her life. The waitress serving the trio sees one of the women throw a fondue fork at her pregnant sister. When the fork lodges in the woman’s stomach, the sister who threw the fork faints while the third sister calmly calls for an ambulance. The girls’ mother later relates the incident to her ex-husband, their father. She feels embarrassed by her daughters’ dramatic behavior and can’t imagine what started the fight.