I understood that shame in my bones, because it had very nearly kept my own mouth shut too.

There is a particular humiliation that predators like Rebecca depend on, and it is not incidental to their method; it is the heart of it.

They choose capable, proud people — people with something worth taking, which usually means people who have been competent their whole lives — and then they turn the very pride that made those people worth targeting into a weapon, because a proud person will often choose to quietly swallow a loss rather than publicly confess he was deceived.

That is the last lock on the whole scheme, and it is the cleverest: the victim guards the criminal’s secret out of his own embarrassment.