I spent four hundred hours embroidering my own wedding gown by hand.

Cora arrived at twenty past ten with her laptop, a bottle of wine she didn't open, and the particular focused expression she wore when something needed to be solved rather than survived.

She sat across from me at my kitchen table.

I laid out everything.

The alteration order.

The folder.

The email.

I told her about the Instagram story, about the salon, about my mother standing in the doorway with my veil.

Cora listened without interrupting.

That was rare for her.

When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

"How are you?" she said.

"I don't know yet."

"Okay." She opened her laptop.

"Then let's do the part you do know."

We started with the Ashcombe Glasshouse.

Cora pulled up the booking confirmation I had saved in my email fourteen months ago.

My name.

My deposit.

My date.

"They would need your written authorization to transfer the booking," Cora said.

"Did you ever sign anything allowing a third party to make changes?"

"No."

"Did Graham have access to your email?"

I stopped.

"He knew my password.

From when I was traveling and asked him to check something for me."

Cora looked at me steadily.

"When did you last change it?"

I hadn't.

We both knew I hadn't.

She turned her laptop toward me.

There it was.

Sent from my own email address, eight weeks ago, to the Ashcombe Glasshouse events manager.

A formal request to add Graham Alcott as an authorized contact.

Allowed to make booking decisions on my behalf.

"I didn't write that," I said.

"I know," Cora said.

He had accessed my account.

He had authorized himself on my venue booking using my own email, my own identity, without my knowledge.

"That's fraud," I said.

"Yes," Cora said.

"It is."

She was already typing.

We worked through until half past two.

By the time we stopped, we had documented four separate actions Graham had taken using either my identity, my accounts, or my financial instruments without my knowledge or consent.

The gown co-commission.

The email attempt to bribe Margot.

The venue access using my email.

And a fourth thing Cora found that I had not even noticed — a charge on the joint account we had opened eighteen months ago for wedding expenses.

A florist deposit.

Placed six weeks ago.

In Sienna's name.

Paid from our shared account.

He had used my money to book flowers for his wedding to my sister.

I looked at that line for a long time.

"I need to close that account tomorrow," I said.

"First thing," Cora said.

"I'll come with you."

She closed her laptop.

She looked at me in the way that meant she was about to say something careful.

"Jules.

Does your mum know what he did with your email?

With the account?"

"I don't know what she knows."

"Because there's a version of this where she's a woman who made a terrible choice to protect Sienna.

And there's a version where she was part of all of it."

"I know."

"You'll need to find out which one before you decide what comes next."

I nodded.

Outside, the city was quiet.

Somewhere a bus went past, its headlights sweeping briefly across the kitchen wall.

"She signed the alteration order," I said.

"She was standing in that fitting room.

She had my veil."

"I know," Cora said gently.

"She didn't call me.

Not once.

Not to warn me.

Not to say she was uncomfortable.

Nothing."

"I know."

"I've been embroidering that gown since September." My voice stayed even.

I was still surprised by that.

"She watched me do it.

She sat with me.

She said it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen."

Cora reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

We stayed like that for a while.

At half past two she made tea.

I didn't ask for it.

She just made it and set it in front of me and sat back down.

"What do you want to happen?" she said.

"Not what should happen.

What do you want?"

I thought about it honestly.

"I want to take the gown back," I said.

"I want the venue.

I want every penny he spent from that account returned." I looked at my tea.

"And I want him to have to explain himself.

Out loud.

To someone with authority."

Cora nodded.

"Then that's the plan," she said.

My phone lit up on the table between us.

A message from an unknown number.

*Juliet.

This is Margot.

I kept copies of everything.

Call me when you're ready.

I'll testify to whatever you need.*

I showed Cora the screen.

She read it.

Then she looked up at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face all evening.

"You're not as alone in this as he thought you were," she said.

And for the first time since I had walked into that salon, something in my chest shifted.

Not relief.

Not yet.

But the first small sense that the ground was still there.

My phone lit up again.

This time it was a number I recognized immediately.

Graham.

I didn't answer.

But the fact that he was calling at twenty past two in the morning told me he had realized, sometime in the last four hours, that he had made a serious mistake.