She was reciting a practiced one, the way you recite something that has always, always held.

And that told me something worse than the assault itself: that this family had done versions of this before, to other people, and had never once been made to answer for it.

Their composure was the composure of the habitually unpunished.

Preston sighing with impatience as though his wife’s terror were a scene she was making.

Damien smirking, folding his arms, so relaxed he was almost bored.

Three people standing over a woman they had brutalized, and not one of them afraid, because in their entire lives fear of consequence had never once been required of them.