Dalek
This is a super good question. My kids aren’t old enough to answer but I’m curious on reading responses
Your story is worse but I hade one kinda similar. We have a guy that is normally 10-15 minutes late. Not a huge deal for us. We’re all friends outside of DnD and he’s there within reason but he’s the most likely to bow out and force a cancel.
Our DM confirms a week out then the couple days leading up. He’s late and I ask “what’s up?” In discord. He replies “I’m having an issue” with no follow up. We wait 20 minutes then I ask if we should call it and he said yes so we didn’t play after sitting there for an hour.
I talked with a mutual friend and she said he was fighting with his wife that night. I get that shit like that happens but it seems really reasonable to me to just say tonight’s not the night early and not make us wait an hour