Three years earlier, the shipment of imported mahogany that Lucy had supposedly stolen — the theft that had been the hard financial proof of her guilt, the two hundred thousand dollars that anchored the entire case against her — had never left our warehouse.

It had never been stolen at all.

Ryan had generated fraudulent shipping manifests to make it look gone, and he had forged Lucy’s digital signature on the authorization forms.

The missing money had never been missing.

It had been quietly funneled into offshore accounts belonging to my sister and her husband.

There was no embezzlement.

There had never been an embezzlement.

There had only been Ryan, and Maya, and a forged signature, and a lie the exact shape of my own jealousy — a lie built so carefully to fit the man I was that I had slipped into it without resistance, like a key into a lock cut for it.