I watched the phone ring, on my nightstand, beside my wife’s hospital bed, and I sent my mother’s call to voicemail, and I felt the last thin thread of a lifetime go quietly slack.

When they were extradited north to face the charges, the arrogance was gone from both of them, completely, as though it had been a costume they could not afford to keep.

My mother looked hollowed out and old in a way I had never seen.

My sister sat at the defense table and sobbed, and stared at me across the courtroom as though I were the monster of the story — as though the man who called the ambulance were somehow the villain, and the women who turned off the heat were somehow the wronged.

Chapter 16 — The Evidence Package

At the preliminary hearing, their public defender did the only thing he could do, which was to try to shrink the whole thing down to size.