Every cell in my body wanted to shout back through the doorway that I knew about the call to Miriam’s office, that I knew what he’d done, that Declan had seen him coming and built a wall he’d just run himself straight into.

“Don’t respond to that,” Miriam said low in my ear.

“Not a word.”

It is hard to describe how much I wanted to answer him.

Not to win — I understood, by then, that I had already won, that the winning was happening in offices across the city without any help from me.

I wanted to answer him for the oldest and least useful reason there is: because he had spent twenty-six years making me doubt my own version of reality, and here, at last, was a moment where I held the true version whole in my hands and he was standing in my doorway lying about it, and every cell of the girl I used to be was screaming to make him admit it, to force him to say it plainly, to hear him confess out loud so that I could finally stop wondering whether I was the crazy one.

Miriam’s two words — not a word — saved me from that, and I have thanked her for it since more than for any legal thing she did.