The messages came from a cloud account that Stephanie had deleted, believing that deleting a thing is the same as erasing it.

It is not; it is one of the first things you learn in my field.

Deleted, but not erased, the account had been recovered, and its messages read, and the record showed that it had been accessed, over and over, from the network in my parents’ house. We. My mother stood in that auditorium demanding answers on behalf of a we that a forensic report had already named, and she did not yet know that the word she had chosen was about to be read back to her in front of two thousand people.

Chapter 8 — The Payment Trail

There was more in the report than the messages, and it had grown, in the weeks of investigation, into something much larger than a cruel family’s private scheme.

A payment trail led out of that recovered account and straight to Stephanie’s boyfriend, a young man named Luca Reed.