That was what Gregory feared, and rightly.

It is why his very first project, before the deed or the documents or any of it, had been to drive Christopher and me apart — to make me see my daughter’s own father as a threat, so that the strongest wall around her would come down before he ever went to work on the rest.

And the tragedy of the years before all this was that he had not needed to work very hard, because Christopher and I had already been doing his job for him, letting our divorce curdle into a low cold war, each of us so busy being wounded by the other that we had left our daughter’s protection team disbanded and undefended.

It took a criminal to reassemble it.