Held up against Dr.

Castellane’s photographs and my mother’s recorded threats, it proved she had been coerced, which turned each of those documents from a shield into a charge.

My brother thought paper was power.

He had never understood that paper is only as strong as the will freely behind it, and that a page signed by a shaking hand under threat is not strength at all.

It is the prosecution’s exhibit A.

They had spent six months manufacturing evidence against themselves and filing it under victory, and all I had to do was hand it to someone who knew how to read it for what it actually was.