She had put away better men than Chandler using nothing but their own confidence.

And now she lay in the dark, memorizing every word, every name, every date — building, in the only place still fully hers, the file that would end him.

The irony was one she would have appreciated in anyone else’s case.

Chandler had spent his career resenting her competence, belittling it, calling her trials mere theater.

And now that competence was the only thing keeping her alive, because a lesser mind would have broken under the horror of what she was hearing — would have retreated into despair, or madness, or the merciful blankness everyone assumed she already inhabited.

Instead she did what she had always done under pressure.