And then they got angry at me for pointing out the wind.” It was the truest thing I knew, and saying it aloud settled something in me for good.

I had not brought down my family.

My family had committed years of fraud, and lied, and stolen, and built their entire empire on a foundation of crime and cruelty, and it was always going to come down; a house of cards always does.

All I had done, in the end, was refuse to keep pretending the wind wasn’t blowing.

The collapse was theirs.