Lorena blocked her own mother.

The Cabo relatives went silent.

The family that had spent five years lecturing me about loyalty and duty and what one owes one’s own turned out to owe each other nothing at all once there was nothing left to extract.

They had accused me, at the end, of destroying their family.

But I had not destroyed anything.

I had only stopped funding a thing that had never been a family in the first place, and let them all discover, in the wreckage, that they had been strangers to one another the whole time.