The prosecutor played the recording for the jury near the end of her case. She did it without preamble, simply asking the courtroom’s permission and pressing play, and Demi’s own voice went out into the silent room — You’re finally going to die, Roderick — cool and amused and unmistakable.

Several jurors looked at the defendant. Demi looked straight ahead at nothing. Then came the photographs of the forged prescription pads and the pages of the journal in her handwriting, and the message threads arranging the attack in the alley, and finally a toxicologist who explained, plainly, that Roderick Benedict had not suffered a natural cardiac arrest at all.

He had been poisoned, slowly, over months, in a manner designed to look like the ordinary failing of an ordinary bad heart.

Chapter 11 — What Money Can’t Replace

When Brandon took the stand, Demi’s lead attorney went after him hard, because Brandon was the story the defense most needed to spoil. If they could make the jury see a grasping opportunist instead of a young man who’d been handed something impossible, the whole case might tilt.

“Mr. Robbins,” the attorney said, pacing, “isn’t it true that Mr. Benedict offered you an enormous sum of money to accuse his wife of a crime?”

“No, sir. He didn’t.”