The moment those words left the announcer's mouth, something shifted completely in James Wesley.Every trace of arrogance, every ounce of confidence, every carefully constructed layer of superiority that he had been wearing all evening like an expensive suit it collapsed. All of it. At once.His voice came out trembling and thin, nothing like the commanding roar it had been just minutes ago.“I — I don't understand what is happening right now,” James stammered, taking a small involuntary step backward. “You are focusing on the wrong person. I am not the one you should be angry at.” He pointed a shaking finger at Hector, his hand no longer steady. “HIM. That man right there. That good for nothing bastard who has been standing up at that podium impersonating the Ross Corporation. I was the one trying to expose him! I was doing everyone here a favor! I was the only one with the courage to call him out and you are deflecting your anger onto me?” His voice cracked somewhere in the middl

Sarah's eyes widened with a realization so sharp and devastating it felt like a physical blow landing somewhere deep in her chest."I made another mistake," she whispered, the words catching in her throat. Her voice rose slightly, disbelief mixing with something that sounded almost like panic. "How? How do I keep making this kind of mistake over and over again?" She shook her head slowly, her hands trembling where they hung at her sides. "Like, seriously, how is this even possible?"Her mind was spiraling now, racing faster than she could keep up with."Hector worked for the Ross Corporation," she said out loud to nobody in particular, to the air, to herself, as if saying it might help her make sense of it. "And he didn't tell me. He never told me. Why? Why would he keep something like that secret? Why would he hide that from me?" Her voice broke slightly. "What the hell is going on?"The crowd watched in absolute silence.And then Hector moved.He stepped away from the podium with th

Sarah's eyes flew open wide, the carefully constructed mask of remorse cracking instantly.“Are you saying,” her voice came out shaking, stripped of every rehearsed quality it had carried just moments ago, “that you don't believe me?”She stared at him like he had just said something in a language she had never heard before.“How could you doubt me? After everything I just said? After everything I just told you?” Her voice climbed higher, genuine disbelief bleeding through the performance she could no longer quite hold together. “This is the truth. Every single word of it is the absolute truth and you are sitting here looking at me like — like I'm lying to you? You don't believe me?”Hector smiled.It was not a warm smile. It was not a cruel smile either. It was something far more unsettling than either of those things. It was the smile of someone who has already seen the end of a story they stopped finding interesting a very long time ago.He nodded slowly.“Yes,” he said simply. “T

Sarah squeezed her eyes shut.“This is a dream,” she whispered, pressing her fingers against her temples. “This has to be a dream. This literally has to be a dream.”But even as she said it, she could feel the cold night air on her skin. She could feel the hard pavement beneath her feet. She could hear the distant sounds of the city moving around her, completely indifferent to the fact that her entire understanding of reality had just been dismantled in the space of ten minutes.“I knew him,” she said, her voice rising slightly with the particular desperation of someone arguing with themselves. “I knew his background. I knew where he came from. I knew everything about him. He didn't have anybody. He didn't have connections or money or — how? How did he do this? How is any of this possible?”The more she turned it over in her mind, the worse it got.Every angle she approached it from dissolved into more questions. Every answer she reached for slipped through her fingers before she cou

James opened his mouth, nothing came out.He stood in the living room and looked at his father and his mother and his brother and felt something he had not felt in a very long time. Something he had spent years constructing elaborate defenses against feeling.Small, Completely and utterly small.His face was already swollen from Mr. Timothy's work earlier in the evening and he couldn't even bring himself to meet anyone's eyes directly. He looked at the floor instead, at the carpet, at the space between his feet, anywhere that wasn't the faces of the people waiting for him to explain himself.He had nothing.No explanation that would hold up. No version of the story that made him look like anything other than what he was a person who had walked into a situation he didn't understand and made every possible wrong decision available to him in the time he had.His brother pushed off the wall.He crossed the room in four steps and the punch landed before James even registered that it was co