A blatant, hurried forgery.

And I stood there in that room with a bag half-packed and my whole body suddenly cold with something other than the memory of the storm, because I had seen a document exactly this dishonest, dressed up exactly this convincingly, once before in my life — five years before, in the papers that sent me to prison.

There is a bitter symmetry in that, and it did not escape me even in the moment, standing in that guest room with my bag half-packed.

The very skill that had destroyed my life was the skill that was about to save it.

Five years earlier, it was my ability to read a set of documents and see the lie hidden in their construction that had made me dangerous to Fiona in the first place — that had led me to uncover her scheme, and thereby to walk into her trap, and thereby to prison.

My competence was the reason I was framed.