Inside that worldview, breaking my leg to make me sign was not monstrous; it was, to them, firm management of an underperforming asset.

They could not see the monstrousness because the monstrousness was load-bearing in their own house.

And so when the house came down, they experienced it not as justice but as betrayal — as the asset, inexplicably, refusing to behave like an asset. You’ll send us to prison, Fiona said to me, in a voice of genuine grievance, as though I had broken some rule.

And in her world, I had.

I had broken the deepest rule of the world she lived in, which is that the foundation stays buried and silent and does not, under any circumstances, decide it has had enough.

Chapter 19 — The Vault