I think that laugh was the true beginning of her healing, and I have come to believe it is worth understanding why an ordinary dinner did more, in that moment, than any grand gesture could have.

Vivienne did not need, that night, to be told she was safe, or brave, or vindicated; she had been told all of those things, and they were true, and they helped, but they were not the thing she most needed.

What she most needed, after weeks of being the center of a terrible story — the missing girl, the accused liar, the victim, the scandal — was to stop being the center of any story at all.

To be, for one evening, simply a person at a table, talking about a roof leak and laughing at a dog.