“I know,” Danette said, and I believed she did. “But it’s not my call anymore. Corporate has a policy about theft flags in patient-facing roles. There are controlled substances in this building, Audrey. I fought them for three days.”

“And?” She looked at the floor. “You keep your current position. The coordinator role goes to somebody else.”

I want to describe what that felt like, and the closest I can get is this: it felt like the floor of the courtroom. The exact same floor.

I had spent two years building a life on top of the belief that the worst thing that had ever happened to me was over, and it turned out I had built the whole thing on a sentence somebody typed into a personnel system while I was scrubbing a toilet on the fourteenth floor.

Grant hadn’t touched me in two years. He paid on the first of the month like clockwork, because a judge had explained the alternative to him.

He’d finished his court-mandated program. He saw Nolan every other Saturday, supervised for the first eight months and then not, and he was — I’ll say it — punctual and pleasant and entirely unrecognizable, in a way I never fully trusted.