Click.

Every arrogant word they sent added to the record my mother was assembling. They were sure my apparent poverty meant powerlessness. They had it backward.

By noon, my father’s security people had pulled the footage from the doorbell company’s servers using my account credentials. My father sat in the vinyl visitor’s chair, opened his laptop, and pressed play.

Even with my damaged vision, I could see the truth on the screen. The video was damning. It showed Vivian shaking the industrial bottle, adjusting the nozzle, raising it to my eye level, and spraying for four full seconds.

Worse, it showed Daniel — his hands locking around my arms, his feet braced to keep me from twisting away. The audio caught my screams, then his flat instruction: “Stop overreacting.”

My father watched it once. He didn’t blink. He closed the laptop quietly, but his knuckles were white.