After I paid $77,000 for my brother’s wedding, he sent me to the wrong city in Italy “as a joke.” I landed in Naples while they were celebrating in Florence. The next morning, he texted: “LOL, I just didn’t want you there.” My mother added, “This is your fault.” I didn’t argue. I smiled… and sent her a gift—four feet tall, delivered by courier. She called me in tears: “Can I please pay you back?”

There it was. The first real red herring of the whole mess clearing out of the water. I had spent two days wondering if my brother’s bride had engineered the prank because she wanted me erased from her fairy-tale weekend. Maybe she still wanted me gone. Maybe she enjoyed the result. But this, at least, suggested the rot had started where it usually did—with Ethan’s need to feel powerful and my mother’s appetite for letting him.

I called Lena.

She answered in a whisper. “Hi.”

“Are you somewhere you can talk?”

A door shut on her end. Then a rush of air. “Now I am.”

I sat at my desk with one hand gripping my own knee hard enough to hurt. “Tell me everything.”

And she did.