Every folder took a weight of shame I’d been carrying and moved it, precisely, onto the person it had always belonged to.

By the time I reached the last file, I wasn’t the woman who’d found the drive. I was someone with a full account of what had been done to her, and for the first time in my adult life, nothing to be ashamed of.

Chapter 7 — How She Did It

When Julian and I got married, Victoria saw a clock start ticking. A stable marriage, children, a whole happy family — that was me winning.

That was me proving I had the endurance our father had made into a competition. Unless, of course, my marriage came apart first.

So she went to work on it, and she was patient about it. She never made a clumsy move like trying to seduce my husband herself.

She was far more careful than that.