The trouble is the word anyone else’s.

I brought down an empire in sixty hours and four hundred and six people were in it and not one of us said the word. I said good when my brother told me a recording was out, and I knew what was on it.

I sat in a house for six years with a phone in my handbag, running an experiment on a man, with a child in the room.

The wreckage was not all his. A significant portion of it was mine, and clearing it was not a thing anyone could do for me, and it took a twelve-year-old with a laptop asking where a scar came from.

Justice did what it does. Gwendolyn is inside. Russell is in a rented room above a hardware store. The estate is gone.

None of that got my daughter one inch of what she needed. What she needed was for the adults who loved her to stop deciding, and that isn’t justice — nobody hands it down, and there’s no wreckage to clear, and it isn’t finished.

She’s thirteen. She has a scar at her hairline that she will have at sixty, and a recording she cannot delete, and a father she may see again at fourteen, and an aunt in a facility who told her one true thing.

And she decides. That’s the whole of what I have to give her, and I had to be taken apart at a kitchen table by my own child to find it.

End of Part Two.