She did not.

She looked at my children again, and something crossed her face — not shame, she had none, but calculation faltering — and she said, “You don’t really expect people to believe this little parade is an accident.” “They came to say goodbye to their grandfather,” I said.

“To a man,” she said, “who was not their family.” I did not answer that.

I had learned, in eleven years of that family and ten more of the wider world’s opinions, that you cannot argue a person out of a cruelty they are enjoying, and that the attempt only feeds them.