Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“That my daughter’s notebook is the case.”

“Your daughter’s notebook is a large part of the case, yes.”

He went out to his car after that meeting and sat in the parking structure for twenty minutes without starting the engine.

Sabina pleaded, eventually, in the way that almost everyone eventually pleads.

Fourteen months after the fact, on a Tuesday morning in a nearly empty courtroom, she entered a guilty plea to theft in the first degree and to child endangerment, with the coercion count folded into the agreement.

She received a sentence in the low single digits with a restitution order attached to it that will follow her for the rest of her working life, and a permanent no-contact order covering Chadworth, both children, and Rosamund Abara by name.