I should have opened it right then.

I have thought about that a hundred times since — the ten seconds I had, standing in the shade of the oak, when I could have swiped it open and read whatever Brannon needed me to read before my mother started her show.

But I didn’t, because I did not yet know what I was looking at, and because eighteen years of that family’s theater had trained me to brace for a performance rather than a crime.

I thought “escrow anomaly” meant a paperwork snag, a signature that needed refreshing, some tedious administrative thing that could wait until after the cake.

It did not occur to me — it genuinely did not cross my mind — that my mother was capable of reaching into a dead man’s trust and stealing my daughter’s future to buy a car.

I had catalogued her cruelties for four decades and I had still, somehow, underestimated her.