Lenette lowered herself into a chair as though her legs had stopped agreeing to hold her.

Isadora watched the old woman sink into that chair and felt, for one strange moment, something close to pity — not for what was happening to Lenette now, but for what the whole thing revealed about the life she had lived.

Lenette had spent decades performing a superiority she did not actually possess, sneering at a daughter-in-law from a height that had been built, entirely, by that same daughter-in-law’s invisible hand.

Every designer gown, every lecture about elegance, every cutting remark about ordinariness had been delivered by a woman standing on a floor another woman was quietly holding up.

There was no dignity in that, Isadora thought, only a long, elaborate self-deception now collapsing in front of two hundred witnesses.

The Beckworths had believed they were the sun and she the shadow.