A drawer full of vials and a folder of photographs looks damning to a son whose father is being poisoned.

To a skilled defense attorney it looks like an opportunity: the disgruntled servant with access to the vanity, the estranged children with a motive to discredit the new wife, the elderly husband whose own wife had documented — in front of witnesses, cruelly but effectively — his cognitive decline.

Dulce had spent a year building her defense before she ever needed it, and if I moved too soon, every piece of it would still be standing.

The competency jokes at dinner parties were not only cruelty; they were groundwork, a hedge against exactly this moment.

To win, I could not simply have evidence of what she had done.

I needed her to commit the final act — the signing, the fraud completed in front of her own chosen witnesses — with cameras running, so that there would be no version of the story a lawyer could tell in which Dulce was anything but what she was.