She had looked at a man in a faded jacket with a sleeping child and understood him to be a person of no consequence, someone who could be steered toward the highway without cost, and she had acted on that understanding with total clarity.

Kendall had understood exactly what she was saying about the cleaning staff.

There was no misunderstanding anywhere in the evening — only a set of choices, made plainly, by people who had assumed the choices would never be seen by anyone who could hold them to account.

What had actually gone wrong for them was not a misunderstanding but its opposite: they had been understood, completely, by the one guest in the world best positioned to understand them.

And Wescott had no intention of letting the softening words stand.

He would not call it a misunderstanding.