The luxury Leontyne wore to look down at me had been bought, in part, with debts I had quietly cleared.

They had been standing on a platform I built, using the height it gave them to spit down at the person holding it up.

And now, in a ballroom, that platform was dissolving in real time on a set of screens, and I watched them both experience the specific vertigo of discovering that the ground they’d been looking down from had never been theirs.

Corvina deleting her videos, Leontyne rising white-faced from her chair — they were not just being exposed.

They were falling, feeling for the first time the actual distance between where they’d imagined they stood and where they’d always really been, which was nowhere, which was on my hands, the whole time.

Leontyne rose, shaking.