Sarah was positioning herself as the patient, long-suffering stepmother, doing everything she could for a broken little girl.

Marcus was being cast as the overwhelmed, grieving, frequently-absent father, unable to cope, ready to defer to anyone who offered a solution.

And Blue Horizon was waiting in the wings, the reasonable financial answer to an impossible situation.

Every drop in the juice, every recording, every rider clause, was a line in a script whose ending was a six-year-old sent away and a six-million-dollar house in the hands of the people who sent her.

“We need to document everything, immediately,” Victoria said.