I signed the license with the same hand someone had forged to frame me, and I thought, absurdly, that at least this signature was mine and true.

I had barely set down the pen when the call came. Our handwriting expert — the one man who could prove the forgery — had been in a car crash on his way to the lab.

He was alive, badly hurt. And his report, the one he’d nearly finished, was gone.

I understood, in that moment, exactly how far Agatha was willing to go. She would silence anyone. She would hurt anyone.

What I did not yet know was what that injured man had managed to record before his phone went dark.

Chapter 9 — Fourteen Minutes

The expert’s phone, recovered from the wreck, held a voice message. He had recorded it and sent it fourteen minutes before the crash — as if some part of him had known.