The detective took the memory card from Rachel’s trembling hand and put it into his laptop, and my husband’s recorded voice filled the hospital room a second time that night.

It was a conversation Rachel had secretly captured weeks earlier — Victor, unguarded, laying out the whole shape of it. Once Clara is gone, his voice said, easy and untroubled, no one audits the signature.

The insurance pays, and the state pins the missing inventory on a dead woman.

It’s clean. And then, on the recording, my sister’s voice, careful and frightened, asking the question I could not have made myself ask: What about the babies, Victor?

And my husband laughed.