The people we let closest are precisely the ones we have decided not to investigate, and that decision, which is the whole basis of intimacy, is also the exact door through which someone like Vanessa walks.

I do not want the lesson of this to be that one should investigate the people one loves, because a life spent auditing your own intimates is not a life worth living, and it would hand a different kind of victory to the Vanessas of the world, a world in which no one can be trusted at all.

The lesson, I think, is subtler and harder.

It is that love does not exempt anyone from their actions, that affection is not evidence, and that when the facts in front of you contradict the story in your heart, you owe it to yourself and to everyone depending on you to follow the facts, even into the ruin of the story.