I had lived so long inside their version of reality — where Noreen was the wronged elder and I was the ungrateful upstart, where every account of events was rewritten to make me the villain — that I think I had needed, on some level, an unblinking machine on the wall that could not be gaslit and would not forget.

For a year the cameras had recorded nothing but ordinary cruelty, the daily grinding kind that never rises to the level of a crime.

And then, in a single afternoon, they had recorded everything, and the witness I had installed out of a fear I couldn’t name turned out to be the thing that would set me free.

Chapter 8 — The Card

While the case was being built downtown, I did the other thing that needed doing — the thing that did not require a lawyer, because it was only ever my own money.

In the back of the car, on the way to my parents’, I had already opened my banking app.