Their lawyers tried, at first, the only defense left to them, which was the one they’d built the whole thing on: that I was unstable, unreliable, a fragile woman spinning a story out of a hard marriage.

It did not survive first contact with the evidence.

You cannot call a woman fragile to a federal jury while they are reading the flawless year-long forensic file she assembled on her own trustee.

The narrative that had nearly cost me my life in slow motion collapsed the instant it met the documents, and the documents were the work of exactly the woman they had spent three years insisting did not exist.

Charles’s cooperation bought him a lighter sentence than he deserved and a longer one than he’d ever imagined.