But it made things easier.

Once she was gone, nobody was left asking your father where the money went.”

The reason they talked so freely — the reason the wire caught everything the prosecutors could have dreamed of — was that they had made the oldest mistake of cruel people, which is to believe their victim was as small as they had worked to make her.

For six years they had seen Sidonie only as they had arranged her to be: broken, cowed, grateful, powerless, a woman who thanked them for cheap groceries and never once fought back.

They had built that woman deliberately, and then they had come to believe she was real, and so they stood in that gatehouse and spoke in front of her as though she were furniture, as though nothing she heard could ever leave the room, because in their minds she had no world to carry it to and no self left to carry it.

It did not occur to them that the woman they’d spent six years diminishing might have kept, somewhere they couldn’t reach, a self they’d never managed to touch — a mother, waiting.