Vanessa was carrying well over half a million dollars in high-interest debt, an accumulation of credit cards and personal loans and, most of all, repeated rescues of her brother, whose speculative investments had failed one after another and who seemed to treat his sister as a bottomless account.

None of that, in itself, was a crime.

Plenty of people carry debt and love a feckless sibling too much for their own good, and that is a private sorrow, not an offense.

The crime, Laura explained, was not the debt.

It was in the messages.

Because along with the debt, there existed a record of communication between Vanessa and her brother, and in those messages the two of them discussed, in plain and unmistakable terms, how to secure access to my estate once the marriage made it possible.

That was the line that mattered, the line between a woman with money problems and a woman running a scheme.