What I understood, in that long walk down the aisle, was the sheer architecture of it — how many months of planning I was walking through.

The conservatorship petition in the safe had been the skeleton; this was the flesh they’d hung on it.

Every piece served the same end.

The staged video didn’t need to be believable; it only needed to exist, to give the whispering a picture to attach itself to.

The doctored footage of my “instability” didn’t need to hold up in a courtroom; it needed to be witnessed by the exact people whose signatures and testimony a conservatorship would require — and here they all were, the judges and the board members and the investors, gathered in one room to see a woman escorted out for her own protection by a heartbroken husband.

Marius had not lost his temper and improvised a cruelty.