Romy Reiner walked into her childhood home expecting to fix a minor inconvenience, not to have her life cleaved in two. The house that had once echoed with her parents’ laughter now held only a terrible quiet, the kind that presses against your chest and refuses to let you breathe. One glimpse of her father’s body was enough to fracture reality; she ran, unaware that her mother lay lifeless just beyond another doorway, a second blow waiting in the dark.

By the time a paramedic told her, softly, that Michele was gone too, the tragedy had already slipped from her hands. Reporters circled. Prosecutors built theories. Her brother Nick became a defendant, a headline, a possible candidate for death row. But away from the cameras, there is only a daughter walking out of the only home she ever knew, carrying a grief no sentence can resolve.