All the small wrongnesses of the past months resolved at once into a single clean line: the way he had been the last person to have the car serviced, the way he had insisted, gently, that she take that particular route, the way his grief had never once cracked into anything real.

She had defended enough guilty men to know exactly what it sounded like when a story finally cohered, and hers had just cohered, and it pointed, without any gap, at her husband.

She was not confused.

She was not even, in that first moment, afraid.

She was simply, terribly certain, the way she had been certain a hundred times across a courtroom — except that this time the defendant was the man she had married, and the victim strapped to the machines was herself.

She wanted to tear the lines from her arms and rise up out of the bed and scream at her sleeping son to wake up and run.