Elise is burning out at that hospital and coming apart. She said it gently, always, like a worried sister.

She never accused. She only ever worried, out loud, in front of the right people, at the right times — and worry, repeated often enough by someone trusted, becomes fact without anyone deciding to believe it.

By the time Julian actually left, my own parents didn’t look at me with sympathy.

They looked at me with disappointment. Victoria had spent three years teaching them that I was the author of my own destruction — that I simply didn’t have the endurance to hold a family together.

She had, in other words, won. As far as everyone in my family was concerned, the case was closed. The weak daughter had failed, exactly as predicted.

Chapter 8 — Harrison Reed

Here is what Victoria did not know. Two weeks after I decrypted that drive, I did not go to a divorce lawyer. I went to Harrison Reed.