She got an old tablet to wake up and tried to push a message out through it — the investigators pulled the draft, unsent, out of the device weeks later. Julius, help us.

Warrick broke in.

Your mother took the phone.

I can’t get out. The house’s network never let it send.

It sat on that dark screen all night, my wife’s last reach toward me, and it never traveled a single foot.

What killed Odile was not a sickness in her own mind, whatever my family swore to the neighbors.

It was an assault, and a locked door, and the deliberate choice of the people on the other side of that door to leave her without the help she spent the night begging for.

She was not abandoned by strangers.

She was abandoned by the family whose name she had taken.

That is the true and legal shape of it, and every court that looked at the evidence agreed.