The trial began six months later and became the city’s favorite fever.
People called it The Glass Floor Verdict. Podcasts bloomed overnight. Commentators analyzed Leo’s posture, Ava’s silence, Nora’s grief. Old footage of Dorian Vale accepting prizes played beside leaked stories of his temper. Tessa Bell’s photograph returned to the news, her yellow hard hat bright as a warning flare.
Ava was the prosecution’s star witness and the defense’s weakest hope.
She had left Kestrel & Vale after the arrest. She told herself it was because no decent person could keep working under that ceiling. The truth was more tangled: she could not sit at her desk without hearing Leo say, I was scared and stupid. She could not cross the glass floor at all.
She also could not stop visiting Nora Bell.
Nora lived above a closed bakery with walls covered in maps, permits, letters, and photographs. Her grief had become an archive. At first she distrusted Ava. Then, slowly, she fed her soup, taught her how to read procurement codes, and spoke of Tessa not as a symbol but as a girl who hated coriander, fixed motorcycles, and sent her mother voice notes while brushing her teeth.
“You’re afraid your love is making you blind,” Nora said one night, without looking up from a box of documents.
Ava stiffened. “I’m not in love.”
Nora gave the dry little laugh of a woman who had survived worse lies. “Then you’re doing an excellent impersonation.”
“I saw his card.”
“You saw a card.”
“I saw a red scarf.”
“So find the woman who wore it.”
“There were twenty-six red scarves in the building security footage that week. The police checked.”
Nora slid a photograph across the table. It showed Dorian Vale at a charity gala, smiling with his arm around a woman in a red silk scarf. The woman had silver-blonde hair and an expression like a locked door.
“Celeste Vane,” Nora said. “Vale’s silent investor. She funds half the firm’s public projects through shell foundations. Tessa wrote her name in the margin of a report.”
Ava leaned closer. “Why would she kill Vale?”
“Because men like Vale don’t confess out of conscience. They confess when the knife is already at their throat.”
The next morning, Ava testified.
The prosecutor led her gently through the fall, the scream, the figure, the access card. Then Leo’s defense attorney rose, an older woman named Indira Saye, famous for smiling only when something was about to collapse.
“Ms. Lorne,” Indira said, “you were under extreme stress that morning, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You intended to resign?”
“Yes.”
“You had feelings for the accused?”
The courtroom inhaled.
Ava looked at Leo. He did not look away.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yet you gave evidence that helped arrest him.”
“I told the truth.”
“Did you tell all of it?”
Ava’s pulse kicked.
Indira lifted a remote. On the screen appeared a freeze-frame from the atrium camera: Ava, coffee in hand, staring upward seconds before the fall.
“What were you looking at before Mr. Vale went over the railing?”
Ava frowned. “The balcony.”
“No. Look again.”
The image sharpened. Reflected in the glass wall beside Ava was another shape on Level Five, opposite the balcony: a maintenance door slightly open.
A hand visible in the gap.
A hand wearing a large green stone ring.
Ava stopped breathing.
She had seen that ring before. Not on Leo. Not on Celeste Vane.
On Detective Mara Quill.
