Aria's POVShe answered eventually.Not immediately. Not cleanly. The way people answered things when the answer had been kept inside for long enough that releasing it required more effort than keeping it had.She looked at her hands on the counter.And she began to talk."I was in trouble," she said. "Financially. I had debts. Real ones. The kind that follow you and get bigger and do not care about your timeline for dealing with them." A pause. "He had money. I made a terrible choice."I looked at her."You faked a pregnancy," I said.She flinched.Small. Brief. The specific flinch of a person hearing something accurate said plainly and finding the plainness harder to receive than they expected."I was desperate," she said."You stole fifty thousand dollars," I said."Aria.""Say it," I said. "Say what you actually did."She was quiet."He went bankrupt Vivienne," I said. "He lost everything. His business. His finances. Everything he had built. He lost it because of what you took."S
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