Seraphina had spent the whole evening, and the whole three months before it, telling a story in which she was the powerful one and I was the trash she was scraping off her shoe.

And when the story collapsed, when every witness she had assembled turned into a witness against her, she reached for the last story available to a person like her: that she was the victim, that I had done this to her, that some clever, vengeful nobody had reached up out of the gutter and pulled her down.

It is always the same, with people who have never faced a consequence — they cannot conceive that the consequence came from their own actions, so they invent a persecutor.

But I had not ruined Seraphina Ravenel.

I had not forged her documents or recorded her voice giving the order to bury a detective or diverted a single dollar of hurricane relief into a beachfront villa.

She had done all of that herself, freely, over years, and I had done only one thing: I had refused to let it stay hidden.