The truth said another.

And I have never, in my professional life, lost a fight between a piece of paper and a fact.”

Chapter 9 — The Tenants Flee

The silence in that room was suffocating.

And the three paying tenants who had been seated around the dining table for my so-called family dinner, three strangers who had rented rooms in my mother’s house believing my sister to be their legitimate landlord, began to understand that they had wandered into something dangerous.

They looked back and forth between me, and Valerie, and the scarred man blocking the door, and I watched the comprehension move across their faces, the dawning realization that whatever this was, they wanted no part of it.