It took Priya’s cousin’s friend the better part of a year to find it and pull it, passed hand to hand through the strange patient economy of people who owe people.

When it finally reached Rosalind, and Rosalind played it down a jail visitation phone, I heard Larissa’s own voice, slurred and vicious and clear enough. I’ll say Adeline did it, she said to whoever was on the line. Roman promised me half once she’s gone. Twelve seconds of audio.

I made Rosalind play it three times.

In a life stripped of everything else, that little clip became something close to a prayer — the thing I held in the dark, the proof that I had not imagined my own innocence, the small hard seed of everything that was coming.

I need to explain what that clip meant, because it was more than evidence, though it was that too.