They were ordinary people, doing the ordinary thing that keeps cruelty running in families everywhere, which is to see it clearly and decide it is not their business, to prize the smooth surface of a holiday over the child being quietly bled beneath it.

I understood them, because I had been them — I had swallowed it too, for three years, for the same reasons.

It is so much easier to tell yourself you are keeping the peace than to admit you are simply keeping your own comfort.

And the terrible genius of a woman like Gene is that she does not need accomplices, only bystanders.

She does not need the whole family to hurt Holly.