“It isn’t fake, Laura.

Every one of those envelopes came back from an address you gave me.

Every stamp on them is real.

You know it is.

So does everyone in this room, now.” She glared at me, and there was something close to panic beginning behind her eyes, the panic of a person who has built a story on the assumption that the evidence would never surface, and has just watched it surface, in a box, in front of everyone she was trying to impress.

I almost felt something for her in that instant, watching the panic climb behind her eyes, some faint reflexive pity for a person about to be exposed.