And now, in the moment she most needed those people, every one of them was silent, and the man she had left her family for was stepping away from her, and there was no one, in a room of a hundred and fifty people, who would stand up and take her part.

A person reaps what they sow, the old saying goes, and I had never seen it demonstrated so completely.

Laura had sown fifteen years of abandonment and lies, and she was reaping, in front of everyone whose good opinion she had come to collect, the exact harvest of it: a roomful of people who now knew precisely who she was, and a silence where her defenders should have been.

I did not gloat.