They had been poor for years, quietly, expertly, the way proud people are poor — never once letting a neighbor see, never once complaining, absorbing each new deprivation as though it were a small private discipline rather than a theft.
And that was the part that enraged Ezra most when he let himself feel it: not that Gideon had taken the money, but that he had counted on their pride.
He had known that his parents would rather cut a pill in half than embarrass the son they’d been told was failing.
He had weaponized the best things about them — their love, their dignity, their refusal to be a burden — and turned each one into another lock on the cage.
There is a particular evil in a crime that requires its victims’ virtues to succeed.
It means every good thing about them was, in the criminal’s eyes, simply a tool.