“You’re threatening me with prison?” he asked, looking at me now instead of Miriam, because suddenly he remembered I existed as something other than a source of funds.
I held his gaze. “You threatened me with taking my grandchildren.”
Karen made a disgusted sound. “Oh, for God’s sake, that was said in the heat of—”
“In the heat of stealing?” I asked.
She shut up.
What followed was not dramatic in the way people imagine family reckonings to be. No one threw anything. No one screamed. That is one of the most important truths I can tell: the destruction of a relationship is often administrative. It happens in initials, signatures, revoked permissions, typed acknowledgments, legal language stripping fantasy from theft.