It is enough to say that the messages laid out a plan to make our deaths look like an accident — that the guardianship scheme had been a fallback, and that the real plan, the one Roland preferred, was worse.

The final message in the thread read: Two girls, one mechanical failure, zero questions after. Detective Cruz read it aloud in the holding room, and the words hung in the air like something that could not be taken back.

And my mother, who had signed onto a scheme to steal from us and to have us declared incompetent, who had directed cruelty and coordinated lies, went rigid, and turned to face her husband, and said the sentence that ended whatever alliance still stood between them.

“You wrote that?