This was the thing my family had never once understood about me, in all the years they spent treating me as a checkbook with a law degree.

They thought my profession was about money — that I was valuable because I earned.

But the law is not a wallet.

The law is a way of seeing, a discipline of proof, the patient art of making a thing undeniable.

Brady thought he had built the perfect trap because it ran on my emotions, on the certainty that a panicked woman doesn’t read the fine print.

He had forgotten, or never grasped, that emotion was a costume I could take off, and that underneath it I was the person who read the fine print for a living.