Chloe could not be on camera.

She could not be heard in the background, asking where her grandmother was, revealing that no responsible adult was present in the home.

Her small, inconvenient, truth-telling presence was a risk to the fraud.

And so someone, weighing the completion of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar theft against the safety of a child, had decided it was simply more convenient to lock her inside and drive to the beach.

That was the moment I stopped grieving my marriage and started building my case.