“Dance, little orphan,” he’d say, circling me with a beer in his fist while my mother sat on the couch, thumbing through her phone like I was nothing more than a loud commercial.

My real father had died when I was nine. He left me two things: his last name and a locked cloud account stuffed with old family videos. Or at least that was what everyone assumed. Thomas figured Dad had left me nothing worth having. Mom figured I was too broken to even remember a password.

They were both wrong.

For years I studied silence the way other girls studied makeup. I memorized which floorboards creaked. I knew where Thomas stashed his cash, where Mom kept her forged signatures, and exactly how their voices shifted when they were lying. I learned to record without ever looking like I was recording.