Stripped of the bought protection and the buried evidence that had always saved people like them before, Chad Kensington, Brantley Holloway, and Wyatt Holbrook each pleaded guilty rather than face a jury with that footage in the room, and each received twenty-five years in federal prison.

The families’ fortunes, built and defended through the very corruption the investigation had exposed, were dismantled lawfully, and a great deal of that wealth was ordered paid, in restitution, to my daughter and to the other young women it turned out these families had made disappear over the years — for Chloe, it emerged, had not been their first, only the one who fought back and left three names in her own hand.

The young woman Chloe saved that night testified.

So did others who had thought, for years, that no one would ever believe them.