And when Wendy was formally served with a criminal summons for child abuse at her own home, the Vance family’s carefully maintained social image simply collapsed.

I watched all of it happen from a distance, and I felt, mostly, a kind of grim vindication that had nothing to do with cruelty.

For two years, this family had operated on a single unspoken confidence: that their image, their standing, their careful public respectability, would always protect them — that a family like theirs did not face consequences, that appearances would hold, that whatever happened behind closed doors could be smoothed over and kept quiet, the way they had kept Luca’s whole childhood of deference quiet, the way they had expected me to keep the banquet quiet.

Their entire power ran on the assumption that unpleasantness could always be managed, contained, hushed.