Everybody gets Claudia Vance wrong and I got her wrong for three years.

She is sixty-nine.

She was an assistant principal in a school district for eighteen years and then a district administrator for eleven more, and she retired in 2018, and for thirty years her entire professional function was to manage situations that other people had created.

She is not a criminal mastermind.

That is the version that people construct and it is wrong and it is wrong in a way that lets everybody off.

Here is what she actually is, and it took a prosecutor and two years and a psychological report to give me the language.