For four years I had endured real danger and real loneliness and real fear, and I had endured all of it inside a story that made it bearable, the story that I was protecting the people I loved.

That story was the thing that got me through.

And my mother and sister had taken that story — my four years, my hundred thousand dollars, my faith — and they had weaponized it.

They had used the fruits of my sacrifice as the very instrument of my wife’s suffering.

Every dollar I earned dodging danger had bought another day of my wife’s imprisonment.

There is no crime report that captures that.