I lowered the papers.

The warm pride I’d felt handing Quinn her keys was gone, replaced by something cold and total.

The woman who had raised me wasn’t just a narcissist anymore.

She was a felon who had tried to detonate my child’s future to buy a prop for the grandchild she preferred.

For a moment I could not separate the strands of what I felt, they came so fast and so tangled.

There was the obvious thing — that she had stolen seventy-two thousand dollars from an eighteen-year-old.