“You ruined this family!”

I shook my head.

“You built the evidence.

I only opened the door.”

We are family. She played that card last, when everything else was gone — the same word she had used as a weapon against Ingrid for six months, no one believes a wife over family, family business stays in the family, we are family and you are not. She had wielded the word as a cage when it suited her, and now, with the marshals in the room, she reached for it as a shield, as though the bond she had spent my whole life exploiting might suddenly obligate me to protect her from the consequences of her own cruelty.

It was the final proof of how she understood the word — not as a set of duties she owed, but as a set of claims she could make.