Isabella’s crying did not move me.
It slicked the room with panic, with the stale salt of fear and the medicinal sharpness rising from the ruined liquid on the floor, but it did not move me.
For three years, men and women had expected tragedy to make me soft. Blindness. Fire. blood. Loss. They imagined pain refined a woman into mercy.
They were wrong.
Pain refined me into accuracy.
Julian’s sample team arrived within minutes. I heard the efficient rustle of protective boot covers, the snap of latex, the click of sealed evidence tubes. Someone photographed the spill. Someone else collected glass fragments. Air monitors were placed near the smoking patch of concrete. The entire time, Isabella kept trying to speak over them.
“This is absurd. She set this up. She’s been obsessed with rui
