My mother’s message was four words long. Delete that folder, Marguerite. She had never once mentioned a folder. She had never been told it existed. Which meant my father had told her, which meant he had known for years that I had it, and that every dinner, every loan, every sigh about drama had been a man managing a witness. The loan was from 2016. Forty one thousand dollars, taken against my credit while I was twenty three and living in their house, signed with a version of my name that his hand had produced and mine had not. I had found it in a credit report four years ago and had done nothing, because doing something would have meant admitting what my father was.

My lawyer read both messages, the one to my husband and the one to me, and said the second was worth more than the first. Attempting to persuade someone to destroy evidence of a crime is its own act, and my mother had put it in writing on a Tuesday morning without thinking for a single second about how it would look.