The corporate friends who had laughed at his jokes and toasted his mother evaporated the moment his name showed up in the financial-crime briefs.

Last I knew, from court filings, he was in a rented one-bedroom on the edge of the city, dispatching trucks for a freight company, earning just enough to cover his restitution and his child support and his monthly check-ins.

Priscilla had not landed any softer.

The bankruptcy took the company and then the lake house and then the life; she lived a few towns over now in a modest condo, telling anyone who would sit still about the ungrateful daughter-in-law who had destroyed her family.

She sent letters, sometimes, through official channels, demanding supervised visits with Felix and invoking a grandmother’s sacred rights.