“I’m trying, the bank flagged a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar transfer, there’s a fraud hold, I’m on with a manager.” He cursed and told me to threaten them, and hung up.

I want to be honest about what I did next, because I have turned it over many times since.

I did not summon a crowd to stage a public execution.

That was the version of me that lived for about thirty seconds in that stairwell — the one that wanted every relative we had to watch them burn.

What stopped me was a simpler, colder legal instinct: people like Brady and my mother survive on the ability to rewrite a private moment afterward, to tell everyone I’d misunderstood, gone unstable with grief, turned on the family.

The only thing that takes that weapon away is witnesses.