It never does.

People who will lock a door on a dying woman will not hesitate for one second to lock one on each other.

I sat through more of that testimony than I needed to, and I think I understand now what I was looking for and never found.

I kept waiting for one of them — any one of them — to break in a different direction.

To stand up and say I did a monstrous thing and I would give anything to undo it. Grief, real grief, for the woman herself.

It never came.

What came instead was a room full of people each trying to slide the whole weight onto the person beside them, and I realized, watching it, that the thing they had all had in common was never love — not for Odile, and not, it turned out, even for each other.

It was only a shared interest in the lie, and the moment the lie collapsed, so did every bond that had depended on it.

My mother had told me my whole life that family was the thing you protected above all else, that blood was thicker than everything, that you closed ranks and kept it in the house.

And here was the house, in a courtroom, every member of it turning on every other.