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He pauses.

“I told myself if I just loved him hard enough, if I anticipated every mood, I could fix it. That’s what victim mentality does. It teaches you to fold in on yourself so completely that you forget how to exist outside someone else’s shadow.”

The jurors are no longer blinking. Not one of them.

I go on. “He hit me. Once. Twice. Then stopped for months. And every day he didn’t do it again, I thanked him. I let the absence of violence convince me it wasn’t real. And when it came back? I blamed myself.”

“He told me I was lucky. That no one else would love me like he did. That I was too much. Too intense. Too emotional. And whenhe wasn’t hurting me, he was making me feel like I owed him something. That I was the reason he hurt at all.”

I pause just long enough to breathe, but not long enough for him to cut me off.

“So I didn’t run to a police station. I didn’t scream in the street. I didn’t keep bruises as evidence. I just got smaller. Quieter. Until one day, I woke up and realized I couldn’t remember what my voice sounded like when I wasn’t using it to calm a storm.”

The defense attorney doesn’t speak. He just lowers his eyes like he knows there’s nothing left to say. And then the prosecutor rises. He walks with a quiet purpose to the table beside the judge and sets down a small flash drive. “Your Honor, with permission, the prosecution would like to enter new video evidence into the record. It is timestamped, location-verified, and authenticated by an independent expert this morning.”

There’s a pause. A slight shifting of bodies around me. I feel more than see the judge glance over the rim of her glasses.

The defense stands abruptly. “We haven’t seen this?—”

“You’ll have time to respond,” the judge cuts in, stern. “For now, proceed.”

The prosecutor gives a small nod and turns to the courtroom, addressing the jury directly as the tech clerk connects the drive to the monitor.

I don’t need to look. But I do.

A hallway. Grainy black-and-white. The camera angle is wide, high up, and slightly crooked. The timestamp sits clearly in the corner. My old apartment building. The hallway right outside my door.

Then Daniel appears, wearing one of his tailored coats, his hair too neat, his expression unreadable. I’m in the frame too, half-turned, trying to unlock the door. I say something—my face is tight with frustration, not fear yet. He steps forward.

I see it even before it happens. The way his hand wraps around my arm. The tug. The quiet threat. The proximity. My whole body recoils, and I try to move past him. He blocks me.

And then he hits me with a fist to my abdomen. I remember the pain.

I double over in the footage. One hand clutches my stomach. The other braces on the wall. Daniel doesn’t help. He straightens his coat, smooths his tie, and walks out of frame.

The footage ends.

The courtroom is so still I can hear the humming of the overhead lights. Someone whispers something too soft to make out. A woman across the aisle covers her mouth. My throat feels scraped raw, but I haven’t said a word.

The prosecutor walks slowly back to the center of the room.

“That footage was recovered from a security camera mounted on the building across the street. The angle caught a clear view of the front steps and entryway to Miss Dawson’s apartment building. It was archived by the property manager after a tenant reported a disturbance that night. No one reviewed the footage until now.”

He turns to face the jury. “Three days after that footage was recorded, Miss Dawson was treated for abdominal trauma and internal bleeding at Valleria General. She did not filecharges. She gave no statement. But the timeline is clear. The documentation is real.”

I can’t process anything that happens after that, but I know there are more words, and then, Ethan standing as I return to my seat, his hand brushing mine.

The trial winds on. Testimony. Objections. A forensic accountant walks the jury through the money. A nurse from the Auralis trials describes altered documents. Mason testifies behind tinted glass, voice steady, laying out the shell companies and falsified ledgers. Names rise and fall like tombstones.

And still Daniel sits, untouched. Untouched until the judge calls for closing arguments.

The defense goes first. They are polished. Brilliant. They cite case law and reasonable doubt. They remind the jury that intent is hard to prove, that memory is fallible. They say Daniel was simply a man in love, misunderstood, poorly advised. They make the jury laugh twice. It is terrifying how convincing they sound.

Then the prosecution stands.

And she does not smile.

She walks to the center of the courtroom and looks at each juror in turn.