I watched Constance in that silence, and I saw something come apart in her that was, in its way, more complete than what came apart in Arthur.

Arthur was merely caught; men like Arthur are always, on some level, braced to be caught, and his collapse was the ordinary collapse of a predator whose luck has run out.

But Constance had built something more elaborate and more fragile than luck.

She had built an identity — a whole self, assembled over decades, founded entirely on the idea that she was the moral center of an exemplary family, the woman whose standards everyone else fell short of, whose disapproval carried weight precisely because it issued from such unimpeachable virtue.

And every bit of that self, I now understood, had been financed by a lie she personally signed a check to bury.