Karen opened the door looking like she already knew, the way she'd known the last time — but this time there was no immediate apology waiting on her lips, just a guarded, brittle kind of stillness that told me she'd had time to harden herself for whatever was coming.
"Both of you," she said, glancing between Law and me standing in her doorway at nearly one in the morning. "That's not a good sign."
"We know what you did," I said, not bothering with any preamble. "The threat. The books. All of it."
"Then you know why I did it too," she said, crossing her arms, something defensive sliding into place behind her eyes. "I told you how I felt, Alex. I told you the truth, and you said you understood, and then I had to watch you two plan a real wedding anyway like none of it mattered."
"Wanting something doesn't give you the right to blackmail people for it," I said, my voice shaking with an anger I'd been holding since the drive over. "You threatened to destroy his family. His entire future. Over a wedding date."
"It was never just about the date," Karen said, voice rising now, the careful control she'd shown moments earlier starting to crack. "It was about being seen, Alex. About someone, anyone, actually choosing me instead of just being polite to me because I'm sick and pitiable. You don't know what that's like. You've never had to know what that's like."
"You're right," I said. "I don't know what that's like. But I know what it's like to watch someone I love turn into someone I don't recognize, and that's exactly what's happening right now."
"I'm not delaying the wedding," Law said quietly, the first thing he'd said since we'd arrived. "And I'm not going to let you control either of our lives through threats. If you go to my parents with what you found, I'll deal with the consequences. But I won't let you hold that over us anymore."
Karen's face went through several expressions in quick succession — anger, then fear, then something collapsing underneath both of those, the careful armor she'd built over the past weeks finally giving way to something rawer and more frightened. "So that's it," she said. "You're both just done with me. After everything."
"Nobody's done with you," I said, even as some honest part of me wasn't entirely sure that was true anymore. "But this — the threats, the manipulation — it has to stop completely, right now, or I don't know how we move forward from here. As a family or anything else."
"I don't know how to stop," she said, and the admission landed heavier than anything else she'd said all night, quiet and devastating in a way that made the anger in the room falter slightly. "I've tried. I really have. I keep telling myself this is the last time, and then something happens — a wedding date, a comment, anything — and the wanting just comes back louder than before, and I don't know how to make it stop wanting something I'm never going to get."
Nobody said anything for a long moment. I looked at my sister — really looked at her, past the anger, past the fear of what she might still do — and saw, underneath all of it, someone who had genuinely lost the thread of who she was supposed to be somewhere between two years of being forgotten and a handful of months finally being seen.
"You need help," I said finally, gently now instead of angrily. "Real help. Not from me, not from Law. Someone who actually knows how to help you figure out why this has taken over the way it has."
"I'm not crazy," she snapped, the fear flaring back into something sharper.
"I never said you were crazy," I said. "I said you need help. There's a difference, and I think you know that, even if it's hard to hear right now."
She didn't answer that. She just looked at both of us for a long moment, something brittle and exhausted settling over her features, and asked us, quietly, to leave.
We did. Law drove that night, Markus having gone home hours earlier, and neither of us spoke much on the way back, both of us turning over everything that had just happened, neither of us with any real idea of what came next.
I didn't know it then, but that confrontation — meant to end the threats, meant to draw a clear, necessary line — was about to push my sister somewhere even darker than where she'd already been. I think about that night often, wondering if there was a gentler way through it that might have changed what came after. I've never found one that I'm certain would have worked. I've only learned, slowly and painfully, that some people break in the exact moment you finally tell them the truth they've spent their whole life avoiding, and there's nothing you can do to stop the break once it's already started.