My mother was charged with fraud and lost, piece by piece, nearly everything she had built by deceit.

I could have made it a spectacle.

I understood the shape my mother had feared — the headlines, the photographers, the public humiliation of a woman brought low in front of everyone whose opinion she had spent her life managing.

And there was a version of me, a younger and angrier version, that would have wanted exactly that: to give her back, with interest, every ounce of the fear she had used on me.

But I found, as the months went on, that I did not want it.