“Mrs.

Redgrave, you don’t have to give a statement now.”

Adaira forced the words out.

“I heard… every… word.”

There was a long moment, after she said it, in which the whole room seemed to understand at once what those three words meant — that the body they had all treated as empty had been occupied the entire time, that every whispered plot and every performed grief and every cruel dismissal had landed on a living, listening, remembering mind.

She watched the comprehension move across the faces she could now, blurrily, see: the detectives, the state’s attorney, the nurse in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.