And in those final minutes, I weaponized the very image of weakness they had spent seven years building.

They believed I was fragile, easily frightened, desperate to protect what little I had; so I gave them a fragile, frightened, desperate woman, because I knew that image would lead them, unerringly, to do exactly the wrong thing.

My feigned terror was not a departure from how they saw me.

It was a perfect performance of how they saw me, and it worked precisely because it confirmed everything they already believed.

Julian smashed that decoy laptop with such relish because I had convinced him it was my treasure, and I could convince him of that so easily because he was already primed, by years of contempt, to believe I was the kind of woman whose whole life could be contained in, and destroyed with, a single machine.