She could not be the loyal friend; she was the one who had done the wounding.

She could not even be the wronged party, the one whose good name was being attacked, because her own panic had already convicted her in front of the crowd — she had told me not to open an envelope before she could possibly have known what it held.

Everything she was, in that community, in that family, in Garrett’s eyes, had rested on a foundation of one carefully maintained lie, and I had just pulled it out from under her, and she was watching herself fall with nothing left to grab.

I felt no joy in it.