Stephanie’s high-society circle, the whole gilded world she had spent her life and her honesty besides to buy her way into, tripped over their own designer heels in their haste to be gone from her before the scandal could touch them.

Chapter 15 — Ask Her if She Has Room

When the worst of the exodus had passed, only a few of us were left on the steps: Stephanie, and Steven, and me, and Eric, and the officers.

Stephanie had sunk down onto the cold stone steps of the house that had never been hers, and she had put her face into her hands, and she was not performing anything now.

I think it had all arrived in her at once — that the boutiques were gone, that the fraud investigators were coming, that the friends were already driving away, that the entire structure of borrowed money and borrowed status and stolen signatures she had built her life on had come down in a single morning, in public, in front of everyone whose opinion she had traded everything to secure.