I felt the specific, quiet relief of a person setting down a weight so old she’d stopped feeling it as weight and had simply come to think of it as the shape of her own body.

He tried to lunge at me and the officers took him down and cuffed him.

Down the hall, Coralie Pruett was arrested at the nurses’ station; a search of her locker turned up tampered medication logs and deleted messages that forensics would recover within the week.

At the same hour, across the suburbs, officers went through my uncle Horace’s house and found the forged contracts, the practice sheets where he’d rehearsed my father’s signature, the ledgers for the offshore shells, and the number of the man who had been paid to make my car fail.

Chapter 17 — All of Them, Willingly

Each of them tried to hand the blame to the others.