What Ferdinand had built was categorically different, and it took me a while, sitting in that underground office, to let myself understand the full shape of it.

He had studied the mechanism by which a competent adult can be stripped of her own voice — the conservatorship, the incapacity finding, the medical declaration — and he had decided to aim it at me.

He had, I would later learn, gone looking for the exact psychiatric language that would make a judge doubt a sane woman.

He had coached his own mother on what to testify.

He had planned to provoke me, on camera, into an emotional reaction he could then hold up as evidence of the instability he was about to invent.

Think about the coldness that requires.