And she watched it reach Chandler last of all, watched the full horror of it arrive in him — not merely that he was caught, but that she had been there, awake, behind her own closed eyes, for every single thing he had said and done beside that bed.

He had not been talking over a corpse.

He had been confessing, night after night, to the one witness in the world most qualified to destroy him, and she had heard all of it, and she had lived.

It was, she would think later, the truest expression of everything she had ever believed as a lawyer.

The truth does not require your permission to survive.

You can silence a woman, drug her, declare her gone, wheel away the evidence — and still, if any thread of her remains, the truth she carries remains with her, waiting, patient, until the moment it can be spoken.