That doubt is the deepest violence they did to me, deeper than the cell — the slow erosion of my own grip on what was real, under the constant pressure of a whole world insisting I was a monster.

And then Larissa’s own drunk voice came out of a stolen dashcam, saying the quiet part aloud, and it did not just prove my case.

It handed me back my own mind.

It was the outside world, at last, agreeing with the thing I had been holding onto alone in the dark: that I was right, that I had always been right, that the crack in me had been a lie too.

I held that twelve seconds the way a drowning person holds a rope, and it pulled me back to shore.