Screenshots. Copies of messages I had never seen, sent from accounts I didn’t know existed.

There were spreadsheets. There were, God help me, receipts. Victoria had documented her own campaign the way she documented everything, because to her it wasn’t a crime, it was an achievement, and you keep records of your achievements.

I did not sleep that night, or most of the nights that followed. I read all of it.

And slowly, folder by folder, the ruin of the last twelve years rearranged itself in front of me into something with a shape, and an author, and a motive.

There is a specific kind of horror in learning that your worst year was a project on someone’s spreadsheet.

I found the notes she’d made after conversations I remembered — dinners where I’d left feeling small and hadn’t understood why, and here was the reason, written down, a line item describing exactly which doubt she’d meant to plant in me and whether it had taken.