The lights went down.

The great screens lowered from the ceiling.

And instead of a slideshow of a happy family, the room filled, in crisp 4K, wall to wall, with the footage from my bedroom.

Chapter 12 — The Footage

The ballroom went utterly silent, the particular silence of two hundred people all understanding something terrible at the same instant.

There was Julian on every screen, unmistakable, and then his own voice came through the ballroom speakers, clear and calm and damning: once I’ve moved the firm’s holdings under my name, she’ll be left with nothing but the mortgage. I had chosen the clips with Eleanor, carefully — not the most salacious moments, which would only have made me a spectacle too, but the ones that mattered, the ones where a man explained, in his own voice, his plan to defraud his wife and his firm.

That was the point.