But I would not perform a false sorrow over it, either, would not pretend that the people who had put my mother on her knees deserved to walk away untouched.

They had earned what came to them, precisely, by their own free choices, and there is a kind of respect owed to that, the respect of letting a person’s actions carry their true weight rather than rushing to soften it.

Without my mother’s allowance and my house to live off of, the two of them had been forced into a small run-down apartment on the edge of the city.

The friends who had drunk by the pool were long gone.