It all clicked into a single, clean shape, and the shape was: they do not love you.

They never did.

They love what you provide.

All those years.

The eighty-hour weeks, the canceled trips, the exhaustion I’d carried so that none of them would ever want for anything — and it had bought me exactly this: a role in a scheme, the mark, the one who always pays.

I did not open the door.

I knew the law too well for that.

If I burst in now, they would deny everything, and Fairbank would say I’d misheard a consultation, and my mother would summon a fainting spell and a crowd, and I would be the hysterical daughter.