He was, at that exact moment, two years deep into a bitter, high-stakes custody fight with the girls’ mother — Pilar Fenwick — who had spent those two years trying to get her daughters out from under him.

Pilar had left him after finally understanding what living with him was doing to her and to the twins — the control that had tightened by degrees until it filled the whole house, the way a family can be slowly hollowed out from the inside by a man everyone outside admired.

She had filed.

She had fought.

And she had been winning, slowly, through the patient lawful machinery of the family court, which was precisely the thing her husband could not tolerate, because it was a system his charm could not simply talk its way through.

Ramsey had seen the pattern before, many times, and described it to Cordell in the flat voice of someone who had stopped being surprised by it years ago.