“Every word you’ve said in that house is already with the prosecutor.” And for the first time in my life, I watched pure terror move across my stepfather’s face.

It did not make me feel powerful, exactly.

It made me feel something quieter and more permanent: the understanding that the man who had built his whole dominion on our fear had just discovered that fear runs in both directions, and that his turn had come.

Chapter 11 — The Warrants

By sunrise, a judge had issued emergency search warrants — for the house, for Roland’s corporate offices, for a self-storage unit rented under my mother’s maiden name that none of us had known existed.

The forensic teams recovered what such teams recover when a careful crime finally cracks open: forged medical stamps, unprescribed sedatives, burner phones, correspondence with the estate trust’s probate attorney.