There were nights I nearly made that call.

I would think of a particular friend crying at the thought of me gone, and my whole heart would rise up and insist that I end her suffering immediately, that no strategy was worth another hour of it.\n\nAnd then I would think of the alternative, and I would put the phone back down.

Because I had learned, in the space of a single afternoon, exactly how the world treats a traumatized woman’s word against a composed wealthy man’s, and I knew that if I surfaced too soon, sobbing and accusing, I would hand Brandon the one thing that could still save him: the chance to control the story before the evidence was locked down, to spin my survival into hysteria, to lawyer up and bury the recording in motions and delays.

The two weeks of grief I allowed my friends to feel were the price of making Brandon’s downfall total and unarguable rather than partial and contestable.

It was a terrible price, and I have apologized to every one of those friends since, and most of them have understood, once they knew everything, that the deception was not a betrayal of them but a weapon against the man who had actually betrayed us all.

Still.