The finances were worse.

The insurance company denied the claim, which was correct and which surprised nobody, and a beneficiary who kills the insured cannot collect, which is a rule with a name Margaret learned that year.

But the two point four million did not simply flow to Sophie, and there were fourteen months of litigation about where it went, and in the end the policy paid to Emily’s estate, and Emily had died without a will, which is the single most common thing in the world.

The debts were the real fight.

Seven hundred and forty thousand dollars of them, some of it secured against a duplex in North Park that belonged, now, to a nine-year-old.

An attorney named Katherine Whitlow took that case and did most of it at a rate Margaret has never been allowed to describe accurately.