The part of my mind that organized, planned, anticipated, built in redundancy — the part Lachlan had spent fifteen years telling me didn’t exist — came online as though it had only been sleeping, and it was sharp, and it was fast, and it did not panic.

I set up the dead-man’s-switch email the way I had once managed complex projects in the career I’d abandoned, thinking three steps ahead, closing every gap.

Three copies, three destinations, so no single failure could bury the truth.

A timer, so that even my own disappearance couldn’t stop the release.

I sat in that basement building a fortress out of information, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was not the helpless woman the courtroom had described.

I never had been.