The silence in Amelia's campus studio apartment was a physical presence, thick and heavy, stretched taut between them. It had been forty-eight hours since Adrian Vale had turned state's evidence against his father, Alistair. Forty-eight hours since the digital walls had come crashing down, headlines screaming about the Vale Corp fraud, the arrests, the spectacular collapse of a financial empire built on lies.
Amelia sat on the edge of her neatly made bed, still wearing the same jeans and sweater from the day before. She was staring at her hands, as if trying to read her own fate in the lines of her palms. The furious, righteous energy that had carried her through the confrontation, the leak, the police it had bled out, leaving behind a profound, hollow exhaustion.
