She is the government’s best friend.

The lead prosecutor, a woman who had spent her career on financial crime and had the tired, unsurprised eyes of someone who has seen every way money makes people ugly, asked me at the end of that first long session why I had come in at all.

She said it plainly, not unkindly: most people in my position lawyer up and go silent and try to save what they can, and here I was handing the government the rope to hang my own family’s legacy, cooperating against a fortune I could have fought to keep a piece of.

Why?

I told her the truth, which was the only thing I had left that was entirely mine.

“Because for six months, a group of people worked very hard to make me doubt my own mind,” I said.