“Every brick of it.

All any of us has done today is stand here and let you watch it come down.” And Gregory took a slow step back, away from her, and not one person in that entire room rose to defend her, and Laura stood alone at the head table in her glittering gown, in the wreckage of the story she had spent fifteen years telling.

That silence, the fact that no one spoke for her, was in some ways the most devastating verdict of all.

She had brought an audience, Gregory and all his relatives, precisely so that she would be surrounded by people on her side, seen and admired as the devoted mother of the bride.