For the first time all day, Marcus found himself completely unable to speak.

And then, slowly, the full architecture of it came clear to him, and it was worse, and more patient, and more evil, than he had imagined.

The document alone would not have been enough to seize the house; there were judicial checks for that.

But the document revealed the objective, and the objective was a story.

They were building a narrative, brick by careful brick.

Lily was being manufactured, on video, into an unmanageable child with severe, undocumented psychological problems, a child who needed to be sent away to residential care.