But the tote that arrived today hadn’t come from Arthur. It came from an independent estate attorney my mother had hired in secret in her final months.

I’d opened it two hours before Ryan called.

Inside was a life insurance policy in my name alone — a policy Arthur had somehow intercepted and drained the week I checked myself into the psychiatric facility.

He’d taken it while I was learning how to breathe again.

And underneath the policy was a leather-bound ledger, in my mother’s handwriting.

She hadn’t only been tracking her own money. She’d been tracking his. Page after page of it, in a patient hand: unauthorized withdrawals, forged signatures on second mortgages, wire transfers out to offshore betting syndicates.