The picture-perfect family that my parents had spent my whole childhood constructing did not survive the graduation, or the newspaper, or the trial.

My father took an early retirement from his accounting firm.

He could not, it turned out, keep walking into an office full of colleagues who had all read the local newspaper’s article on the university cybercrime investigation — an article that named his daughters, and quoted the forensic findings, and made the private arrangement of our family suddenly, permanently public.

My mother stopped attending the weekly bridge club and the country club luncheons that had been the center of her life, because she could not endure the subtle, pitying glances of the very women she had spent decades performing for.

I want to be precise about the irony here, because it is the whole moral of the thing.

For twenty-two years, my parents had sacrificed me — my childhood, my savings, my dignity, my place at my own table — on the altar of a single idol: the appearance of a perfect family.