While I gathered, Roman grew careless, the way men do when they have gotten away with a thing long enough to believe getting away with it is simply their nature.

Two months before my release, his lawyers sent me a legal notice, forwarded through Rosalind, demanding that I vacate the old lake house — the one property still partly in my name, the one thing of my father’s he hadn’t yet fully swallowed.

And at the bottom of the cold legal language, Roman had added a line in his own hand, because he could never resist the flourish. You lost, Adeline.

Disappear gracefully. I sat in a cell and read those four words, disappear gracefully, and I laughed — actually laughed, out loud, for the first time in two years, until the woman in the next cell asked if I had finally lost it.