And my mother’s reply, cold and clear, is the sentence I will carry to the end of my life.

“Then let it look like she got into a fight with a dealer, or stepped out of line.

Nobody’s going to take her word over ours anyway.” Nobody’s going to take her word over ours. There was the whole of it, spoken aloud: their absolute confidence that their status and my ruined reputation meant that the truth would never matter, that they could do this to me and be believed, because they were who they were and I was, by then, no one.

And Detective Ramirez paused the video, and I broke down, sobbing into my hands, not from grief, but from a relief so total it shook me.