Craig sat in county custody through the early hearings, and the house in Mesa, with no one paying for it, turned against the people inside it.

No power, no water, in the worst of the summer.

Noreen, who had never in her life gone without, hauled jugs of water from a gas station to flush a toilet and slept in the heat and grew gaunt and unwashed and frightened.

She swallowed her pride and called Lorena, and Lorena — who had smelled the money drying up — blocked her number and vanished.

The relatives who had taken my money for years, the ones she’d flown to Cabo, stopped answering.

In the end she sold the furniture I had bought to sketchy liquidators for pennies on the dollar, just to scrape together a retainer for the only kind of lawyer who would take a case this hopeless.