Selina’s fabricated scratch, her false report, her performance of victimhood, all of it was designed so that my death would be recorded as something other than the truth, a justified defense, a tragic accident, anything but the truth.
They intended not merely to end my life but to rewrite it, to make me, in the official telling, the aggressor, the attacker, the one who deserved what she got, while they walked free and grieving.
And it was that, more than the dying itself, that some deep part of me could not accept.
I might not be able to stop them from killing me.
But I could refuse to let them lie about it.I could make certain that whatever they told the world, the truth existed, somewhere, in Julian’s own voice, waiting to contradict them.
That was the refusal that moved my hand to my wrist: not the desperate will to survive, but the more implacable will to not be erased and replaced by a lie, to insist that the truth of what happened to me would outlive my body if my body could not outlive the afternoon.
It turned out that my body did survive, that the refusal saved not only the truth but me.
But even if it had not, even if I had died on that rug, the refusal would have been worth it, because it would have meant that Julian and Selina, whatever else they got away with, would not have gotten away with the lie.
And in the end, that is the thing a person can always refuse, even at the very edge of death: not always survival, which is not always in our power, but the truth, which, if we are stubborn enough, we can insist upon with our very last conscious act.
Chapter 4 — Record
I was not going to die as merely a victim.
That was the thought, clear and cold, that cut through the shock and the pain.
If I was going to die on this rug, I was going to take them with me.
So I did the only thing I could do.
I let my eyes roll back.
I let my body go completely limp, and I let my left arm fall hidden beneath me, out of their sight.
And I played dead.
It was the hardest performance of my life, lying utterly still while my own blood soaked the rug and my husband cooed over his mistress, but I held it, because everything now depended on them believing I was gone.
And with agonizing slowness, using the last of my strength and the smallest movements I could manage, my hidden left hand found the smartwatch on my wrist.
And I tapped it.
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