You probably would have spent the entire evening complimenting our family, admiring my wife’s composure, telling everyone how lovely she was.

But you believed we were people without money or influence.

You believed we had nothing you wanted and no power to make you regret how you behaved.

And so you decided you were free to humiliate us.” “I’m sorry,” Victoria whispered.

“I’m not the person who needs your apology,” Robert said.

And there it was — the whole of it, the thing the entire evening had been about and the thing Victoria had never once grasped: that her decency had always been for sale, extended only to people she thought could reward it or punish its absence, which is to say it had never been decency at all.

Decency that appears only when you learn someone is powerful is not decency.