To assemble the truth so completely and so cleanly that it needs nothing from you at all, and then to step back, entirely, and let it work through the neutral machinery built for the purpose: the fraud department, the police report, the warrant, the judge, the sworn evidence.

I did not want to be the one who punished my mother.

I wanted to be nowhere near it.

I wanted her undone not by an angry son she could cast as a villain, but by her own recorded voice, and the timestamps, and the medical records, and the cold indifferent weight of documented fact — by a truth so complete that my presence in it was unnecessary.

That is what I meant.

I was not going after them.