Mom’s hand didn't shake when she took the blue gel pack from his fingers, but the silence that settled over the kitchen felt heavy enough to crack bone. For a long, agonizing second, my brother—let’s call him Julian, though in that house he had mostly just been an extension of our parents’ blind spots—stared at her palm as if the plastic had suddenly transformed into something venomous.

Holding Room B was a windowless box of cinder block and gray paint. The metal table between us was bolted securely to the floor. When Julian walked in escorted by a guard, he didn't look like a terrified teenager facing multiple felony charges of domestic assault, voyeurism, and wire fraud. He looked calm, almost serene, wearing an orange jumpsuit that was two sizes too big for his lean frame.

He sat down across from me, folded his hands neatly on the metal surface, and smiled—that same thin, knowing smile he used whenever he wanted me to feel like I was missing the point of a joke.

“You shouldn't have gone into my drawer, Leo,” he said softly. His voice didn't have any anger in it; it sounded like an older brother offering gentle advice to a younger sibling who had broken a toy. “That was private.”

“You kept a birth certificate of a dead kid in a hidden compartment, Julian,” I said, leaning forward. “You spent four years locking our sister in a bathroom and pretending to be our family's savior. Nothing in that room was private. It was evidence.”

Julian tilted his head, studying me with those flat, dead-gray eyes that never seemed to reflect the light. “You still don't get it, do you? You think I was just being cruel to Chloe because I liked the sound of her crying.”

“ Weren't you?”

“Cruelty is inefficient,” he said, his voice dropping into a clinical, detached rhythm. “Cruelty leaves a mess. What I was doing was calibration. Families are like engines—if you don't apply pressure at the exact right stress points, the whole system explodes under its own weight. Look at Mom and Dad. Before I started managing their schedules, they hadn't had a real conversation in five years. They were drifting apart. I brought them together by giving them something to fix.”

“By breaking our sister's arm?” I shouted, slamming my palm against the metal table. The guard outside the reinforced glass door shifted his weight, his hand resting on his utility belt.

Julian didn't even flinch at the noise. He just smiled wider. “She’s weak, Leo. Just like you. You both think the world operates on feelings and fairness. It doesn't. It operates on leverage. And right now, I have all the leverage I need, because even with all your little investigations and your police reports, you still don't know why I chose this house.”

My breath hitched. I thought about the birth certificate I had found in the manila envelope—the name of the family from four hundred miles away, the fire on the stairs, the past Mom and Dad had never talked about.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.