“Shut up, you idiot!” he snarled at her.

“You told me she didn’t know anything!

You said she was helpless!

That sentence, shouted at my sister in the panic of his arrest, was the whole story in miniature, and I have thought about it often since.

You said she was helpless.

It was the premise the entire scheme had rested on, the load-bearing assumption at the center of everything they had built: that I was helpless.

Valerie had sold Julian on the plan by promising him that the absent sister in Singapore was no threat, a jet-lagged afterthought who could be papered over and pushed out.