But the final, decisive piece of it was handed to the prosecutors by the last person any of us expected: Amber herself.

Amber requested a private meeting with prosecutors, desperate to cut a deal behind her own husband’s back.

And it was in that moment that I understood something true and clarifying about my in-laws: that the same family who had been so perfectly united, so vicious and coordinated, when the target was me, were in fact cowards who would turn on one another the instant real prison time entered the room.

Their loyalty to each other, which they had held up to me for a decade as sacred, evaporated the first moment it cost any of them something.