She had done her crying over the last six months, alone, over a man she was only now realizing had never deserved a single tear.
What she felt instead was a kind of cold clarity settling into place, like a key finding a lock.
She copied the file.
She copied it again, onto a second drive, and a third.
She noticed her own hands as she did it — perfectly steady, not a tremor in them — and it struck her as remarkable.
For six years, the smallest conflict in that house had set her heart racing and her hands shaking.
And here she sat, watching the single most devastating thing she had ever seen, and her hands were calm as a surgeon’s.
Something in her had already crossed over.
The woman who could be wounded by these people was gone, and in her place was someone new, someone the family had not met yet and would not meet until it was far too late for them to do anything about her.
Then she closed the laptop and went to make dinner, and when Dorian came home she asked him about his day, and she smiled, and he never once suspected that the woman passing him the salt had watched him that afternoon and simply decided to win.