Behind the brick, the USB drive waited exactly where he said it would, a tiny, ordinary object with the power to detonate a life. On my laptop, folders bloomed open: dates, times, grainy kitchen footage, late-night calls, hotel bar meetings, receipts, a slow, methodical record of Rebecca’s performance unraveling in real time. I watched her lean over his mug when his back was turned, listened to her discuss “timelines” with a man whose face she never let the camera catch, heard her talk about “finally liquidating assets” once the house was sold. My father hadn’t been oblivious; he’d been enduring, documenting, moving his pieces while pretending to be too tired to notice. James’s voice on the phone was steady when I told him. “We can take this to the police,” he said. I stared at the frozen frame of Rebecca in my father’s kitchen and realized that exposing her would turn his last months into evidence, his illness into spectacle. “Not yet,” I answered. “For now, it’s enough that she knows we can.” The next morning, her lawyer’s envelope arrived: she was relinquishing all claims, leaving the state, begging in one shaky handwritten line for my silence. It was the first time I’d ever seen her admit fea… Continues…