I would think about Deirdre for a long time after that night.

For twenty years she had been the great enabler of that house — the one who smoothed the edges, who explained away the cruelties, who chose the family’s reputation over its conscience at every turn, and who had, in her looking-away, helped build the exact machine that killed one of her sons and turned the other into a murderer.

She was not innocent, and she knew it, and I think that knowledge was the heaviest thing in that shed.

But there is a difference, I have come to believe, between a person who is complicit and a person who is beyond saving, and the line between them is whether they can ever, even once, choose the hard right thing over the easy loyalty.