This is how it works.

This is how it always works, in every case I have ever prosecuted: the exploiter does not invent the family’s fault lines, they find the ones already there and they lever them open.

There is always a sibling who lives far away and feels bad about it.

There is always an old grievance, a sense of who did more and who did less, a guilt that can be pressed.

Julian had simply read our family the way I read case files, found the pressure point — Elena’s guilt about her distance — and applied steady weight to it for years, until everyone, including me, half-believed that my absence had forfeited my right to ask questions.