Even the choice to involve his own credentials had a cold logic to it, a way of controlling the medical narrative from the inside.

It was the plan of a man who had looked at his own child and seen, instead of a person, a variable he could move around a board to win a lawsuit.

Cordell had spent a career learning that evil is rarely dramatic — that it mostly looks like exactly this, like a competent person doing careful planning toward a terrible end, filling in the boxes, optimizing.

Fenwick had done his planning well.

He had thought of nearly everything.

He had simply, fatally, filed his own daughters under objects instead of witnesses, and one of the objects had turned out to be a little girl who was watching him back.