Every element of Emiliano’s spectacle — the crowd, the cameras he’d hired to film his own coronation, the investors he’d gathered to witness his ascension — I had quietly repurposed into the machinery of his undoing.

He thought he was throwing a party to launder a theft.

He was, in fact, assembling, at his own expense and by his own hand, the single best-attended, best-documented venue imaginable for his own arrest.

The most satisfying part, the part I let myself savor as I watched him work the room, was that he had built the whole thing himself.

I had not lured him anywhere.

I had simply let him construct his own trap, brick by confident brick, and then walked in through the door he’d left open for a woman he was sure could no longer think.