It let him keep believing I was playing the game he expected, protecting my one asset, while the real case — the criminal one, the one that would take his freedom — assembled itself in the silence he wasn’t watching.

My father used to say you don’t tell the other side which fight you’re actually having.

I secured the house so they would think the house was the fight.

It never was.

The house was just the thing they wanted.

The fight was for the truth, and I ran it exactly one careful step at a time.