What saved Mabel was not, in the end, the justice system, or the truth, or her own innocence.

What saved her was luck — the wild, arbitrary luck of being loved, once, long ago, by a man who grew up to have the specific resources required to take a rich family apart.

And Damian cannot stop thinking about all the women who are not lucky in that particular way.

The framed accountants, the scapegoated clerks, the innocents crushed by people with legal teams and political friends and pockets deep enough to make the truth an expensive and lonely thing to insist on — the ones whose first loves did not become billionaires, whose dirt roads no SUV ever slowed down on.

The truth of their innocence is sitting in some account too, provable by the same methods, waiting.

And no one is coming to prove it, because proving it costs more than they have, and justice, in the world as it actually is, turns out to be terribly, unforgivably expensive.