He talked the way a man talks when he believes no one who matters can hear him — loosely, arrogantly, the caution long since burned off by his own certainty of winning.

Over the following weeks, a small recorder under a hospital pillow gathered it all: the mechanic who had done the work on the car and was now across the border in Mexico; the instruction to Cassia to move the offshore transfers before Rosamund could get an injunction; the date, coming fast, when Ellwood would finally sign the paperwork declaring Adaira beyond recovery.

Each sentence landed in the machine and in Adaira’s memory at once, and each one was, she knew, another year of the sentence he was writing for himself without any idea he held the pen.

She had spent her career telling juries that the guilty always overreach.

She had simply never expected to prove it from inside a coma, with her eight-year-old son operating the evidence.

Chapter 12 — Today It All Ends