There was a bitter symmetry in it that I did not appreciate until later.

The phone she had used to document a year of my family’s suffering was my own — a device I had handed her, wiped and ready, as a small kindness when her own broke.

I had given her the very instrument of the abuse, and more than that, I had left it tethered to my family’s cloud account, which meant that every clip she filmed had been quietly copying itself to the same account that held our vacation photos and Elodie’s baby pictures.

My mother, for all her cunning, had not understood the technology well enough to sever that link.

She thought the little key on the nightstand drawer was security.

She thought a locked drawer in a room in my home was a place her secrets were safe.