He had destroyed a hollow shell, a decoy, a two-thousand-dollar machine containing nothing that did not exist, safely, in triplicate, elsewhere.

And in the process, by breaking into my home and smashing my property in a rage, he had handed my attorney a fresh and useful piece of leverage, documented by the very security cameras he had been too enraged to notice.

He believed, in that moment, that he had won something.

He had won nothing but a felony charge, a security-camera recording, and a headline of my choosing, at a moment of my choosing, should I ever decide to write it.

He had, in fact, done the one thing guaranteed to make everything worse for his family — and he had no idea, yet, that the files he was trying to bury did not incriminate his mother alone, and did not even, in the end, incriminate the person he most feared they would.