Julian had access to my accounts, and, it turned out, an illegally copied key to my home.

My in-laws had standing to walk into any part of my life they chose, to spend my money, to use my name, to break down my door with a crowbar, and I had been taught to receive all of it as the natural condition of belonging to a family.

That is what the absence of a lock actually means: not openness, but exposure, the state of a person who has no control over her own boundaries, whose life is a public commons that anyone with sufficient entitlement may enter and take from.

And what I reclaimed, over that long year of audits and evidence and federal agents, was not only my money, though I got that back, and not only my safety, though I got that too.