Red and blue lights painted the front of my brick house in strobing color. Grant and Judith stood on the porch, surrounded by a dozen men and women in dark windbreakers marked with the yellow letters of the FBI and Army CID.

Police radios hissed static through the cold morning air.

Grant was disheveled, his polished arrogance gone, replaced by trembling panic as a federal agent patted him down against the porch railing. Judith was feral — screaming, waving a sheaf of useless bank papers, her styled hair falling in clumps around her face.

“This is my son’s property! She signed it over to us!” Judith shrieked as a female agent locked her wrists into handcuffs. “Tessa authorized the loan!

She’s mentally unstable! Let go of me!”

I stepped out of the car, carrying Evelyn tight against my chest in her thermal carrier. The wet gravel crunched under my boots as I walked up my own driveway, my spine straight.