“That doesn’t mean everyone conspired against you,” Helen said gently. “The prosecutor wasn’t in on it. The judge wasn’t in on it. The jury wasn’t in on it. They just saw what they were shown. It means
we have to prove facts that couldn’t be proven back then.”
For four years, I’d believed that everyone had chosen not to believe me. That the whole world had looked at me and decided I was a liar.
Now I saw something worse.
Nobody had needed to choose anything.
Trevor and Monica had used real paperwork. Real codes. Real gaps in the investigation. My own inability to rebuild what had happened while I was sitting in a hospital waiting room.
They hadn’t needed to fool every single person in that courtroom.
They’d only needed their story to look a little more convincing than mine.
One afternoon in November, Russell called me at Opal’s.
