I read the message four times.
Then I set the Fitzgerald novel face down on the arm of the reading chair with the careful precision of someone managing their hands because the alternative was less careful, and I sat very still in Adrian's library while the city performed its nighttime routine forty floors below and thought about five years.
Five years of carrying the weight of what I'd done at that gala. Five years of telling myself the accusation had been my fault, my anger, my grief, my failure to verify before I spoke.
I'd built an entire architecture of guilt around that night. Had structured my understanding of myself partly around the fact that I was someone who had done that. Who had been capable of that?
And Adrian had known, for all five of those years, who had handed me the
