It was her mother, at the end of the wine-soaked dinner, reaching through the air for her husband’s hand.

That was the whole of it, Emily came to think — the entire meaning of the evening compressed into a single gesture.

Victoria had assembled every prop of superiority money could buy, and had used them all, and in the moment that actually mattered, the moment a human being was cruelly humiliated in front of a room, all of Victoria’s expensive advantages had produced nothing but a smaller, uglier person.

And Grace, who had nothing that evening that Victoria valued — no sight, no visible wealth, no costume of importance — had produced, in the same moment, something Victoria could not have bought with all her husband’s construction millions: the quiet, unshakable dignity of a woman who does not need to lower herself to the level of the person attacking her, because she carries her worth inside her, where no one can throw wine on it or kick it under a cabinet.