“You don’t have to be scared anymore.”

She had spent months terrified that this voice — the confession, the calm, the plotting — would die with her in the dark, unheard, that Chandler would walk out of the hospital in his beautiful suit and be mourned by strangers as a devoted husband while the truth rotted inside a silent body.

To hear his own words turned against him, in his own voice, in front of officers of the court, was a species of justice so exact it felt almost unreal.

She had built her whole career on the principle that a person’s own words, spoken freely when they believed themselves safe, are the most damning evidence there is.

She had simply never imagined she would prove it lying flat on her back, unable to lift a hand, while a hidden recorder her eight-year-old had operated did the work of a hundred cross-examinations.

And something in Adaira, some final door that had been held shut for months, came open all at once.