The trial took three weeks, and I lost it on the second day.
I had told myself the whole way through that the courtroom would be a battlefield I knew how to fight — numbers, witnesses, cross-examination, the weapons of a man who had closed bigger deals than the prosecutor had ever seen. But Eleanor never entered the room. She had recused herself, the clerk explained, and the case was tried by people who had no reason to remember that I was Richard Sterling.
The evidence was the wall I had walked into at the ballroom, rebuilt stone by stone. The Northwood server logs. The Cayman transfers. The psychiatric report with Chloe's edits in red. And the recording — the little gray recorder the size of a hand, which the prosecutor played for the jury in the same silence I had heard it in, with Le
