“Mum and Dad and I,” Elise stammered on. “We … We didn’t know she was going to do it. Any of it. We thought that after Stories and Lives didn’t show the accusation a couple of days ago that maybe it would all blow over. But it hasn’t. It’s getting worse. Stories and Lives won’t answer the phone to us. We’ve spoken to Mel and she’s agreed to read a statement for the press retracting her interview.”

“So she…” I could hardly speak. I looked at Sean, who was blank. Stunned. “Melanie, she—”

“She lied,” Elise said. “She’s sorry.”

The story emerged in frantic stops and starts. Elise began crying in time, wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands. No one seemed game to go into the interview room and sit down, to move out of the hall, in case Elise and her words evaporated into thin air as quickly as they had appeared.

Melanie had suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness for years. Elise wondered if she was bipolar, but it was difficult for her and her parents to get her older sister to go to specialists or take any medication, so a treatment plan when doctors did make an attempt at diagnosis was unmanageable. Though the relationship between the two women was strained, Elise had called Melanie when she first saw me on the news after my arrest for Claire’s abduction, remembering me from when we were kids. She’d received some texts from Melanie in the months afterward, always about the case. Elise had worried that her older sister was following the case too closely, that it might become one of her “obsessions.” Melanie had, at times, become fixated on the activities of American presidents, climate change, and the occasional murder cold case. But my arrest had really captured her imagination. And then, one devastating day, Elise’s mother had called after visiting Melanie’s apartment. She told Elise she had found something worrying.

“Mum didn’t know what it was,” Elise said. “But when I looked at it, I knew. It was an appearance contract. It was signed by the producer, by the network heads, by Melanie. It stipulated money that Mel was going to receive for her interview with them, with Stories and Lives.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?” I asked.

“Mum found the contract last week.” Elise sobbed. Her mascara was smeared. “It was too late. She’d already given it.”

“The network didn’t call you at all to check Melanie’s story?” I asked. “They didn’t call your parents?”

“It was the money, Ted,” Elise pleaded, glancing at Sean. She must have known from Sean’s face that he was with me. My lawyer was slowly purpling from the neck up. “Melanie wanted the money. She told them she was the only one who could account for your … what you wanted to do to me. She said she never told our parents, and that she’d asked me and I didn’t remember. She wanted that money. And the show, they wanted the story.”