AITA for refusing to be my friend's alibi for skipping a family dinner?
AITA"If Mum asks, we were making dinner at yours," my friend Leila said. She was actually going on a date.
We're both twenty-seven. Leila lives with her parents while saving for a place, and Sunday dinner has become a regular argument. She says they take any other plan as evidence that she doesn't care about them. This week she told them she was helping me move a bookcase.
I hadn't agreed to that. Her mother sometimes calls me directly, so I said I wouldn't confirm something that hadn't happened. Leila asked whether I could at least say we had plans. I said, "Only if we actually do."
She ended up going to the family dinner and canceled the date. She says I made an easy escape difficult by treating a small cover story like a formal statement. I said I didn't make her attend; I just wouldn't join the story.
What complicates it is that I've accepted her help dodging invitations before. She once told a mutual friend I was tired when I'd simply decided I didn't want to go. I didn't correct it.
I could have kept her plans private without giving her mother an account of the evening. But I gave Leila a flat refusal and then lectured her about telling the truth. AITA for drawing the line here?