“Bring the drive to the clerk’s terminal,” Judge Vane ordered. “Ms. Mercer, you may assist the clerk in locating the matching file directory, under the marshal’s supervision.”

I walked toward the clerk’s desk, my heels clicking against the linoleum.

My mother watched me pass, her eyes cold and distant.

She had built her entire social life around her connection to the Whitakers and the prestige of her husband’s memory.

To her, this was the destruction of everything she valued.

To me, it was the only way to breathe again.

I opened the laptop and plugged in the connection cable provided by the clerk.

The clerk, a young woman with wire-rimmed glasses, looked at me with wide eyes.

“Load the partition labeled ‘Archive-Alpha-Nine’,” I told her.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard.

A prompt appeared on the screen, demanding a twenty-eight-character master key.

The marshal handed the USB drive to the clerk.

She inserted it into the side of the terminal.

The computer hummed, the blue progress bar appearing on the monitor that mirrored our screen onto the wall for the judge to see.