I felt no pity.

I only watched, and every cold measure I had taken from that hospital bed was validated in front of me.

What I felt, watching them, was closer to a grim anthropology than to triumph.

Because I had spent five years inside that family believing its central myth — that they were bound by a fierce, clannish loyalty, the Prentices against the world, and that I was the outsider forever failing to earn my way in.

Regan had used that myth as a weapon on me for half a decade: we take care of our own, and you’ll never quite be our own. And here, under the fluorescent lights of Courtroom 4B, the myth dissolved in under a minute.

The loyalty I had envied and been excluded from turned out to be nothing but a shared appetite, and the instant the appetite could no longer be fed — the instant there was no more of my money to split and only prison to divide — mother and son turned on each other with a viciousness they had never once turned on the world outside.