There was a faint sound behind me.
Someone inhaled sharply.
Victor’s attorney closed his eyes.
Melissa covered her mouth, but not quickly enough to hide her smile.
And then Victor laughed.
“Come on,” he said. “Mopping floors doesn’t make somebody a business owner.”
Something inside me became completely still.
For months, I had imagined this day.
Sometimes I imagined shouting.
Sometimes I imagined throwing every photograph, receipt, tax return, hospital record, and signed vendor contract onto the table until Victor drowned beneath paper.
But Grace had warned me.
“He knows how to provoke you,” she had said.
“He needs you emotional.”
“Why?”
“Because if you look irrational, he can make the evidence look like revenge.”
So I sat quietly.
I breathed.
And twenty years came back to me.
Not as years.
As sensations.
Frozen cardboard cutting into my fingers at four in the morning.
Boiling stock splashing across my wrist.
