By the time the judge said my name for the last time, my legs had turned to glass.
“Ms. Collins will be responsible for full restitution to Black Industries, plus associated damages and costs.”
The words didn’t sound real. They floated somewhere above the packed courtroom, over the rustle of suits and the distant clicking of a reporter’s pen. For a second I just stared at the judge’s mouth moving, like maybe if I watched closely enough, the sentence would rearrange itself.
It didn’t.
The gavel came down. A sharp crack, like a book’s spine snapping.
The bookshop had burned six weeks ago. This was worse.
My lawyer—public defender, overworked and kind in a tired way—murmured something about appeal options. I nodded because nodding was easier than saying, “I own three pairs of shoes and a secondhand bike, how exactly am I supposed to pay back a billionaire conglomerate?”
When I turned, the gallery shifted like a single animal. Faces angled toward me. Some curious, some pitying, some hungry. Phones hovered, catching my red eyes, my thrift-store blouse, the way my hands shook as I collected my bag.
“Ms. Collins! Sophie! Do you have anything to say to the victims of the fire?”
Victims. I swallowed acid.
The bookshop had been my whole world. Mrs. Harrow, the owner, was seventy-two and now sleeping on her daughter’s couch. The part-time kids, the regulars who spent more on coffee than novels, the couple who got engaged in aisle three between fantasy and travel. We were all victims. But my name was the one in headlines: LOCAL CLERK’S NEGLIGENCE DESTROYS HISTORIC SHOP.
My fingers curled tighter around the strap of my bag.
“Ms. Collins, did you disable the alarm that night?” another voice called.
“No comment,” my lawyer said firmly, stepping in. Her arm brushed mine—a brief, human touch—before she steered me down the aisle.
That was when I felt it.
Eyes. Different from the rest. Steady. Cold, but not in the usual way. Like a winter sky, stripped of everything soft.
I glanced up.
He sat in the second row on the defense side, as if this were a performance and he’d bought the good seat. Dark suit, darker hair, an expression that looked carved rather than grown. I recognized him from photos even before the whisper reached my ear.
“That’s him,” someone behind me breathed. “Adrian Black.”
Adrian Black, heir to Black Industries. The man whose lawyers had just gotten a judge to declare me financially responsible for their losses, as if my minimum-wage job had secretly included a multi-million-dollar liability clause.
He didn’t look like a man who’d just won.
He looked…focused. Like I was an equation he was still solving.
I ripped my gaze away and kept moving. The courtroom doors loomed, heavy, an escape that opened onto nothing useful. Outside was press, and outside of that was a city where every job application or rental form would ask if I’d ever been convicted of negligence resulting in property damage.
Technically, this wasn’t a criminal conviction. Yet. The compensation order, though—it was a life sentence.
I made it to the hallway before the reporters surged. A dozen bodies, microphones like small weapons.
“Ms. Collins, do you accept the court’s ruling?”
“Are you planning to declare bankruptcy?”
“What do you say to rumors you disabled a fire exit to stack sale boxes?”
