The audit became an investigation, the investigation became charges, and within two years she was convicted of embezzlement and wire fraud and sent to serve a sentence that the newspapers, briefly, found interesting.

The paid hotel record and the frame she had built came out along the way, one squalid detail among many, and were noted and moved past.

Rhett spent those same two years filing custody petitions through expensive firms, and every one of them failed — not because I fought them into the ground, though I was ready to, but because there was nothing to fight.

Ames’s trusts were ironclad.