The man in the doorway was a federal agent, and he said, “Colonel, we have the guest house on the warrant.” The three calls I made from the highway were not to friends. They were to a liaison who connected me to a task force that had been looking at the Holloways for two years. The family’s confidence about courts and media and state government was not paranoia. It was accurate. They had spent a decade making problems disappear. What they had never encountered was a problem that documented itself in real time, with timestamps, from a moving car, by someone who does this for a living.

The phone I placed screen-down on the tray had been recording since I stepped out of my vehicle. Rosalind’s line about the family always winning is on it. So is Wesley’s about women not equipped to handle them. So is every word Delphine whispered about the locked guest house and the taken phone. The nurse had already preserved the chart. The intake photographs of my daughter’s arms did the rest.