There were surveillance photographs — our house, Elspeth leaving school, our daily movements.
And, taped to the wall among them, old photographs of a young woman I recognized with a jolt that hollowed me out: my mother, Adeline, as a girl, decades before I was born.
There was a notebook tracking our schedules in obsessive detail.
And one line in it was underlined twice in red: If Mireille fails, activate Plan B with the girl.
My mother-in-law, I understood, standing over that notebook, had never been the center of this.
She had been the instrument.