I've been accused of a lot of things in my life. Treason wasn't on the list until tonight.
The accusation landed like a physical blow, the room's collective attention pressing against me with a weight I hadn't felt since the council chamber, except this time laced with something colder and more dangerous than mere hostility toward an outsider. This wasn't about whether I belonged. This was about whether I'd betrayed people I'd risked my life for that very morning.
I thought, in that suspended moment before I found my voice, about every accusation I'd ever weathered in my life — customers who thought a woman couldn't possibly know engines as well as she claimed, distant relatives who'd questioned my father's judgment in raising me alone, the quiet, persistent doubt that had followed me th
