For years I had told myself she was as trapped as we were.

The tape had just told me otherwise, in her own words, and I believed the tape.

Chapter 8 — The Papers

Weeks earlier, searching Roland’s desk for my birth certificate, I had found the papers Nora meant, and had photographed every one of them.

They laid out a plan, and the plan was this.

Roland and my mother had arranged for a private psychiatrist to be bribed into declaring Nora and me mentally incompetent — five days before our eighteenth birthday.

The desk held fabricated psychiatric evaluations, draft guardianship applications, and forged copies of our signatures.