The delicate innocent who had walked into my home to orchestrate my death sat at that defense table with the performance stripped away, and underneath it there was only a frightened, ordinary criminal, and I understood, at last, that she had never been powerful at all.

She had only ever been convincing.

And a courtroom is the one place where being convincing is not enough.

Chapter 13 — Guilty

When the lead prosecutor played the complete, unedited audio from my smartwatch, my husband’s own voice confessing over my supposedly dead body, and paired it with the hospital security footage showing him standing over my bed in the dark with a loaded syringe, there was very little left for any defense to argue.

The jury took less than forty-five minutes.