“Tell them whatever you want, Frances,” I said quietly.

“But Brannon already has the IP address of the computer that sent the wire.

Unless you can prove I broke into your locked den to trace my own signature, you’re going to need a very expensive defense lawyer.” I peeled her fingers off, one by one, and stepped aside as the lead officer reached the table.

There was a moment, as I lifted her hand from my sleeve, when our eyes met, and I saw her do the thing she had always done — the fast, animal recalculation, hunting for the angle that would save her.

It was the same look I had watched her wear my entire life, the look of a woman who had never once, in seventy years, believed that the rules applied to her.

She had talked her way out of everything: out of the neighbors’ complaints, out of the cousins’ resentments, out of forty years of small cruelties that never quite added up to consequences because there had never been a paper trail and never been a witness willing to stand.