My parents gave me my brother's MacBook for my 18th birthday, unaware I overheard them planning to let me take the fall for his crimes.

The silence in the interview room after the call ended was absolute.

I sat there, staring at my locked screen. My mother didn't call back. Neither did Ryan. They knew. The moment I cut the connection with that final line, the realization must have hit them like a freight train: I wasn't their pawn anymore.

"Good work, Emily," Detective Vance said quietly, resting a hand briefly on my shoulder. "You just handed the United States Attorney an open-and-shut case on a silver platter."

"What happens now?" I asked. My hands had finally stopped shaking, replaced by a strange, hollow numbness. It was the feeling of standing in the ashes after your whole world had burned down in a single hour.

"Now," Agent Cross said, buckling his holster and grabbing his coat, "we take your family into custody before Ryan decides to destroy whatever servers he has hidden in your basement."

They wouldn't let me go with them, of course. For safety reasons, I was moved down the hall to a secure lounge. A female officer brought me a bottle of water and a warm blanket, but I couldn't drink, and the wool felt like sandpaper against my skin.

Forty minutes later, Detective Perez returned. She carried a tactical tablet in her hand, her face grim.

"They're in custody," she reported.

I closed my eyes. "All of them?"

"All of them," Perez said. She sat down beside me and set the tablet on the coffee table. "Ryan tried to smash a secondary external hard drive with a meat tenderizer in the kitchen when the tactical team breached the front door. They tasered him before he could hit it twice. The drive is intact."

"And... my parents?"

Perez hesitated, her expression softening with genuine sympathy. "Your father tried to tell the arresting officers that you stole Ryan's computer out of jealousy because they bought him a car when he graduated college and didn't buy you one. He claimed you were mentally unstable and had been threatening to frame Ryan for months."

A bitter, dry laugh escaped my throat. "Of course he did."

"It didn't work," Perez continued gently. "We played the audio recording you made on the staircase directly to him while he was sitting in handcuffs in your living room. He didn't say another word after that. Your mother simply broke down crying. She kept asking if anyone had called the neighbors."

Not *Where is my daughter?* Not *Is Emily safe?*

*Did anyone call the neighbors.*

The social shame of a police cruiser in the driveway bothered Eleanor Miller more than throwing her youngest child into the federal penal system. Any lingering trace of guilt inside my heart withered and died right then.

"You're safe now, Emily," Perez said. "We're going to put you up in a secure hotel tonight under an assumed name until the arraignments tomorrow."

I looked at the window. The sky over Columbus was beginning to turn a dull, bruised shade of indigo as dawn approached.

"I don't think I'm safe," I murmured.

Perez frowned. "Why do you say that? Ryan is in a holding cell. Your parents are being processed right now."

"Because you said Ryan stole four point two million dollars," I said, turning to look her in the eyes. "Ryan is a coward. He’s always been terrified of physical confrontation. He wouldn't have had the guts to steal that kind of money unless he was working for someone who told him to."