I had been, and still was underneath, a formidable professional with a decade of crisis expertise and an emergency protocol memorized.

They had taken away my phone and my passport, the external proofs of my identity.

They had not been able to touch the identity itself.

And I have had to reckon, since, with my own part in the misunderstanding that nearly destroyed me, because it would be too easy to lay all of it at Julian and Evelyn’s feet.

They built their plan on a false model of who I was, yes.

But I was the one who had given them that false model.