I was not prepared for the arithmetic when the number was my mother.

Because what my sister and Julian had constructed was, at its heart, a machine for turning a human life into cash, and my mother was merely the component that had to be held still for the machine to run.

Her home was the collateral.

Her wakefulness was a risk factor to be managed.

Her very existence, alert and capable of speech, was an operational threat to the smooth functioning of a criminal enterprise, and so she had been reduced, chemically, to a component that would not threaten it.

That is what fraud does, at the extreme: it does not see people at all.