Valeria began writing short stories, filling notebook after notebook with worlds of her own invention, and reading them aloud to me in the evenings.

And Marisol ran the entire estate with a calm, brilliant authority that even my senior corporate executives came to envy.

The legal proceedings against Chloe ran on for months, but the outcome was never in doubt; the security footage proved the child abuse and the false-report threats, and the forensic accounting confirmed the theft of over a million dollars, and in the end she was sentenced to six years in state prison.

I felt, when the sentence came down, no triumph.