She thought of my degree the way she thought of everything I did — vaguely, dismissively, as something boring and beneath her attention.

She did not know, or had never bothered to learn, that the field I had given four years and two jobs and every late night to was digital forensics.

The science of exactly this.

The discipline of taking a fabricated digital record apart, thread by thread, until it gives up the identity of the person who built it.

She did not know that, from the moment I saw those too-perfect screenshots, a cold and steady part of me had stopped being a victim and started being an investigator — that I had gone to an attorney, and the attorney to the university’s forensic team, and that the very evidence meant to destroy me had, instead, begun to be read backward, toward its source.

And she did not know that, some weeks before my graduation, the university had quietly and completely cleared me — that the investigation had already turned all the way around, and was now pointed in a direction she had never imagined it could go.