In almost any other room, on almost any other night, it would have worked.

The crowd would have believed her, Kelvin would have been shamed into doubt, and I would have been the disgraced thief who fled the party.

What she could not have known was that I had seen those exact statements two weeks before, in their unaltered form, when her own terrified accountant laid them on a table in front of me — that I knew precisely which numbers were real and which were her clumsy edits, and that the same screen she was using to frame me was, to anyone who knew what to look for, a confession with her fingerprints all over it.

She thought she was showing the room my crime.

She was showing the room hers, blown up ten feet tall, in lights.

Chapter 4 — Panic Wastes Oxygen