Not the machinery of my rage.

The other machinery — the slow, patient, overwhelming machinery of the law, which my brother had spent months betting my father was too old and too frightened and too alone to ever reach.

He had bet wrong.

He had simply never understood who his sister was.

I stood in that hallway afterward with the shower still running and let myself feel, for just a moment, the size of what I had just set in motion, and it steadied me the way it always does.

People misunderstand the law.