“I didn’t steal it!” Vanessa shrieked, the elegant mask finally, completely shattering. “You offered to help! You always wanted me to have the best! Well, this is the cost of the best, Mom!

If you hadn’t been so obsessed with showing off to your stupid country-club friends, maybe we wouldn’t have had to keep up appearances!”

The cruelty of it was breathtaking. Vanessa had bled her mother dry, and the moment the well was empty, she blamed the victim for the thirst.

Margaret looked at her golden child — the daughter she’d championed, the daughter for whom she had struck my wife. And in Vanessa’s eyes she saw nothing at all.

No love. No remorse. Just the frantic calculation of a rat on a sinking ship.

“Get in the car, Vanessa,” Robert snapped, glancing nervously at our neighbor’s window, where a curtain had just twitched. “We’re wasting our time. They aren’t going to pay.”