Once, on a Tuesday when Logan was in Miami, I took my passport and my birth certificate to her apartment in a grocery bag and said that if anything happened, that was where they were.

Then we drank coffee and talked about a television programme for forty minutes and I went home.

Chapter 3 — Sign Your Name

Months later, Logan’s business began to collapse under debt. One evening he slammed a stack of high-interest loan agreements onto the dining table and demanded I sign as a personal guarantor.

“Your clean credit is the only thing that can save my company,” he said, towering over my chair.

I refused. Early the next morning I found his laptop open on the desk, displaying contracts, credit applications, and corporate loans worth millions — all bearing signatures identical to my own hand.

I printed every page and confronted him in the living room.

Brenda stepped out from behind the kitchen counter, her eyes cold. “Show her who is in charge of this household, Logan.”

He grabbed my neck with both hands and slammed me against the edge of the marble bar. I went down onto the tile, breathless. His sister, Paige, walked in at that moment, glanced at me on the floor, and pulled out her phone.

“I work with doctors and bank directors every day,” she said, looking down at me. “One call from my office will have you committed for a nervous breakdown, and the three of us will testify that you did this to yourself.”

Chapter 4 — The Basement

Three days before my father was due home from a long deployment, Logan brought me a power of attorney that would transfer the oceanfront property I’d inherited from my late mother into his name.

Her name was Ines. She had bought that house on her own at forty-four, with her own money, and I tore the papers to pieces in front of him.

His slap knocked me to the hardwood floor. Brenda seized my wrists, and the two of them dragged me down the stairs to the dark basement. They forced me into a small windowless storage bathroom and left me a pitcher of water and three slices of bread.