She arrived primed to see Nicholas.

The young man she met knew things about the Barclay family — he had researched them, he had been briefed over the phone, and he had asked questions during those conversations that allowed him to accumulate information he could then deploy as apparent memory.

He knew details about the house, about family members, about specific events in Nicholas’s life.

Those details — presented with apparent certainty, with the emotional weight of someone recalling them after a traumatic separation — were enormously powerful.

Each detail felt like proof.