I was alone with the two people who had stolen my house and imprisoned my mother, and they both believed, with total confidence, that they had already won.

I did not blame the tenants for fleeing, then or now.

They were, in their way, victims too, ordinary people who had answered a rental listing and handed over deposits to a woman they had no reason to think was anything but a landlord, and who now found themselves in a room turning dangerous.

Their instinct to get out was sound.

But their flight left me in a position I had not planned for, alone and outnumbered, and I remember the specific loneliness of that moment, the sense of every ally in the room evaporating just as I most needed witnesses.