The officers moved through the elegant dining room while two hundred guests set down their champagne and went silent. Diane stood frozen near the head table, her hand pressed to her chest, staring at the two detectives now standing directly in front of her husband. I caught only fragments at first, “financial investigation,” “we have a warrant,” and the sight of Diane’s face draining of every ounce of its earlier smugness.

The lead officer spoke clearly enough for the nearby tables to hear. Diane’s husband was being questioned in connection with a fraud investigation, and the anniversary party, it turned out, had drawn attention because several of the very guests in that room were people he owed money to. Diane grabbed the officer’s arm, shrieking that there had to be a mistake, that they were respectable people, that this was humiliating in front of her guests. The officer calmly asked her to step back. And as I stood there in my “cheap-looking” dress that fit me perfectly, watching the woman who had told me to stop eating so much come completely undone, I understood that the lavish life she’d used to look down on everyone had been built on something far uglier than any of us knew.