He Married Me to Steal My Family’s Shipyard. My Brother Spent Fifteen Years in a Wheelchair Waiting to Prove It

People assumed I would want to — that I would sit in the front row every day and drink in the sight of the three of them being dismantled, that the watching would be a balm.

It was the opposite.

I went when the prosecutor needed me and stayed away the rest of the time, because I had learned something under that pier a year before that I did not want to unlearn in a courtroom: that the wanting-to-watch-them-suffer was a hook, and that a hook, once it’s in you, is held by the person on the other end of the line.

Callum would have loved to know I was out there consumed by him, organizing my days around his downfall, letting him occupy the center of my life from a cell the way he had occupied it from my bed.