He wanted them comfortable.

He knew that people who came to a rich family’s door expecting to win through shame would, if you simply let them believe they were winning, keep talking until they had said every incriminating thing in their hearts, and that the safest place to record a confession is a warm living room where the person confessing thinks they hold all the cards.

So he opened the gate not in surrender but as the first move of a closing trap, and the beauty of it, from his point of view, was that his opponents would walk into it congratulating themselves the entire way.

The movement shocked the three of them silent.

They exchanged triumphant looks — the rich had folded, terrified of the scandal — and Noreen got up off the pavement, dusted herself, lifted her chin, and marched through the gate like a conquering general, lecturing my father as she passed about how educated people ought to discipline their daughters.

My father said nothing.