“Take those off and put them straight in the trash bag,” I told her, nodding at her clothes, my voice cold.

“We’re throwing all of it away.” “I can wash myself,” she offered, and her voice, when she said it, was surprisingly gentle and somehow cultured, not at all what I expected.

“I’d rather make sure you don’t ruin the marble,” I said.

There was no reason to say a thing so cruel except that cruelty came easily to me then, because I did not think of her as a person who could be wounded.

That is the sentence I have sat with the longest, in the time since — I did not think of her as a person who could be wounded — because it is the whole mechanism of every cruelty laid bare in a single line.