That is not the act of people overwhelmed by circumstance.

That is the act of people who had decided, coldly and deliberately, that their child was a problem with a price, and who then went looking for someone to pay.

The pressure did not make them do it.

The pressure merely revealed what they were willing to do.

Chapter 9 — You Chose Well, Son

Their wedding was small, and intimate, and held in a quiet local chapel, and it was, despite everything I was privately carrying, genuinely beautiful.

Gabriel wore a sharp charcoal suit, and when the doors opened and my sister began to walk down the aisle toward him, he cried.