The irrevocable trust with its unbreakable eighteenth-birthday lock.

The brother sworn to protect us.

He had built, before he died, a set of protections designed to survive his absence and defeat exactly the kind of person who eventually came for us.

He could not have known it would be Roland.

But he had known, the way careful people know, that a fortune left to two young girls would draw danger, and he had spent his last months quietly fortifying us against a threat he could only imagine.

My father protected us from the grave with the only tools he had ever trusted: careful records, locked in places no liar could reach.