The Trial
The courtroom was packed with reporters and Caroline’s society friends. I wore a simple navy dress; Caroline wore pearls and a pale suit, playing the wounded matron. The prosecutor, Amanda Cameron, laid it out: motive (disapproval of the marriage), means (access to diazepam), opportunity (an unattended head table), surveillance showing deliberate action, and toxicology confirming the drug.
Witnesses set the timeline—the DJ, the catering manager. Jennifer testified that five diazepam pills were missing. Then I took the stand. I described two years of Caroline’s cold precision—her control, her subtle undermine—then the sight of her hand over my flute, the pill, the switch. The defense tried to twist my choice into cruelty: that I’d orchestrated her humiliation. I answered the same way each time: I didn’t know exactly what she’d put in my glass; I only knew I wouldn’t drink it.
A security expert walked the jury through the footage frame by frame, showing Caroline reading the place cards and targeting my flute. A toxicologist testified that the dose she ingested would cause disinhibition, confusion, and poor coordination—the precise behavior the world had seen. If I had drunk that amount, at my smaller weight, the effects might have been worse.
Caroline took the stand and denied everything—then pivoted: she’d been “nervous,” she said; her sister had “offered” her a tablet; she’d “confused” the glasses. The prosecutor pressed: no prescription, pills from her sister’s bottle, no warning to anyone after she supposedly dropped medication into a flute. Caroline had no good answers—only shame and fog and, “I didn’t want people to think I couldn’t cope.”
Whatever the verdict, one truth had already settled like glass: I saw her. I saved myself. And the mask Caroline wore finally cracked where everyone could see.
