That is the part that gives me the most hope.

In the years since, I have heard it come from people who were among the loudest against Vivienne once — from Mrs.

Gable, of all people, who now stops a rumor the way a person stops a fire, having learned, at Vivienne’s expense, exactly what a rumor can burn down.

A whole town watched itself be wrong, in the ugliest possible way, about the gentlest person in it, and a few of them, at least, were changed by the watching.

They learned the thing Pastor Timothy tried to teach them from the pulpit, the thing my own mother learned in a bedroom with a cup of cooling tea: that a comfortable suspicion is not harmless, that the easy story is worth distrusting precisely because it is easy, and that the loudest, first, most confident voice in a scandal is very often the one with the most to hide.