That was what had turned a polite man into a man who chains his own front gate and walls off his own backyard and grows frightening in the night.

Elena had discovered that her husband was looting her family’s trust, and she had confronted him, and she had told him — Maya would tell the advocate this later — that she was taking her daughter and leaving.

And Julian, cornered, watching his whole scheme come apart, had decided he could not allow that.

Everything that had happened to my daughter, the silence and the fear and the hiding, had happened because a thief needed his wife and her child kept quiet for a few more days while he emptied the vault and ran.

I have thought a great deal since about how ordinary the root of it was, and how that ordinariness is somehow the most frightening part.

Julian was not a movie monster.