She had just handed the fear back.

The room was silent.

Dalton opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

Eugenia’s certainty had gone out of her face.

And I understood that whatever happened next in the offices and the courtrooms and the board meetings, the essential thing had already happened, right there — the moment a young woman he had built an entire machine to silence stood up in a room full of his allies and refused to be silent.

Everything after that was just the law catching up to a fact that was already true.