It had been a forensic auditor, watching, and understanding, and documenting, and waiting for exactly the right moment.

Across the stage, an officer closed handcuffs around Tessa’s delicate, manicured wrists, and her designer purse tumbled to the floor and spilled its contents in front of the press cameras, and she shrieked, and the ballroom dissolved into chaos, reporters shouting, microphones thrusting into two suddenly pale and humiliated faces.

And the grand twenty-year illusion of the Vance family legacy crumbled into dust, on live television, in front of everyone whose good opinion they had spent their lives cultivating.

And I thought, watching it fall, of the people the illusion had actually cost.