If you’re not back by tonight I’m locking you out. I screenshotted every message and forwarded the set to Katarina’s secure folder.

He was, with each panicked text, building my case for me — the way that family built everything, without ever noticing they were doing it.

The texts were a study in a mind that still did not understand what had happened.

Read them in order and you can watch him cycle through every register except the one that might have mattered.

First the appeal to his mother’s distress, as if her feelings were my problem.

Then the apology, thin and instrumental, the I went too far of a man sorry to be caught rather than sorry to have done it.