The court ordered David’s life insurance restored — placed, this time, into a protected trust for his daughters, where she could never touch it again — and returned the apartment and the heirlooms she had taken from me six years before.

When they handed me back my mother’s locket, in a plain evidence envelope, I held it in my palm and felt six years fall away.

Agatha was convicted and sentenced to prison. At our final hearing she turned to me, her face tight with a hatred that no verdict had softened.

“You destroyed this family’s name,” she said.

I looked at her, and I was not afraid of her, and I understood that I never had to be again.

“No,” I said.