“It doesn’t become public, Vanessa,” I said.

“It becomes real.

That’s the part you never understood.

You’ve spent so long managing how things look that you forgot they also are.

That sentence came to me unplanned, but I have thought since that it was the truest diagnosis of Vanessa I ever made.

Her entire life was a project of appearances.

The polish, the charm, the designer clothes, the performance of devotion, all of it was surface, tended with enormous skill, and underneath the surface there was, as far as I could ever tell, very little, only appetite and calculation.

She had managed appearances so successfully for so long that she had come to believe appearances were the whole of reality, that if a thing looked handled it was handled, that if the ugliness stayed behind closed doors it did not quite count.