I have wondered, since, why a gift that costs so little is given so seldom, and I think I have come to understand it, and the understanding has changed how I move through the world.

It is not that people are cruel, most of them.

It is that believing someone is not, in fact, as free as it looks — it only looks free.

To believe Vivienne, that whole town would have had to pay a price they did not want to pay: they would have had to accept that a respected woman among them, Delilah, was a monster, and that they had been fooled by her for years, and that their own quick judgment of Vivienne had been not just wrong but cruel.

Believing the victim would have cost them their comfort, their certainty, and their good opinion of themselves.