“Mom,” she said.

Chapter 23 — What I Dismantled

I set the tray on the small wrought-iron table and handed my mother her tea, and I sat, and for a while none of us said anything, because nothing needed saying.

Over the preceding six months, everything about my world had been taken apart.

I want to be plain about what that meant, because it was not a figure of speech.

With Hollis Crane’s guidance and Juliet’s full consent, we had dismantled the criminal architecture my father had spent forty years building and I had spent fifteen defending.