In the hospital they had been a united front — three people moving as one organism, finishing each other’s threats, smiling the same smile, presenting the seamless confidence of a clan that had never once faced a consequence it couldn’t buy or bully its way out of.

I had taken them, in that moment, for a family bound by loyalty, however poisoned.

I saw now that I had been wrong.

They were not bound by loyalty.

They were bound by impunity — by the shared, unspoken certainty that they would always win, that no harm they did would ever come back on them.

And the instant that certainty cracked, so did the family, because there had never been anything underneath it but self-interest.