"I never imagined the most terrifying sound I’d ever hear wouldn’t be my six-year-old son crying for help—it would be my own mother laughing after I asked if he was still alive.

The Estrella Mountain Regional Jail was a bleak, concrete fortress rising out of the desert heat.

Through Julian’s legal channels, Emily was granted a fifteen-minute visitor window with her sister in the attorney-client visitation room. When Brittany was led in, handcuffed and wearing an oversized orange jumpsuit, Emily barely recognized her.

The arrogant, dismissive girl who had sneered over the phone in Seattle was gone. In her place sat a pale, shivering twenty-two-year-old with dark circles under her sunken eyes.

"Emily?" Brittany whispered, her voice cracking as she sat across the acrylic glass divider. "Did... did Mom send you? Did she pay the bail?"

Emily looked at her sister with a mixture of intense anger and overwhelming pity. "Mom isn't paying your bail, Brittany. She bought her own freedom. She’s letting you take the entire fall."

Brittany froze. "What? No... no! Harrison Vance said if I sign the affidavit saying I did it all, Mom’s legal trust would put $200,000 into a defense fund for me!"

"There is no legal trust," Emily said, sliding a printed document against the glass. "This is Eleanor’s financial disclosure filed in federal court today. She transferred her remaining liquid assets into an anonymous trust in the Cook Islands yesterday afternoon. She’s planning to flee the country the moment her trial charges are restructured. You are going to state prison for twenty years for attempted murder and child abuse, Brittany. Alone."

Brittany stared at the document. Tears welled up in her eyes, spilling over her pale cheeks. "She promised... she promised she wouldn't leave me..."

"She never loved either of us, Brittany!" Emily said, leaning close to the glass, her voice burning with conviction. "She used me to get access to Apex Logistics! She used you as a low-level worker bee to run her illegal errands! And when six-year-old Ethan saw what you were doing, she turned him into a victim without blinking an eye! You sat there and watched her laugh at my pain over the phone!"

Brittany put her hands over her face, sobbing hysterically. "I was scared! Emily, you don't know what she’s like when the doors are closed! If I didn't go along with it, she threatened to put me in the shed too! She’s been doing this to me since dad died!"

Emily felt a tear slip down her own cheek. The cycle of horror in Eleanor’s house ran deeper than she had ever known.

"If you want to save yourself from spending the best years of your life in a maximum-security cell, you need to turn on her," Emily said firmly. "Tell Detective Vance and the federal prosecutors everything. Give them the passwords to her encrypted drives. Tell them who locked Ethan in that shed."

Brittany looked up, her chin trembling. "If I tell them... will Ethan ever forgive me?"