3. The Economy of Tears

The economy of tears operates on principles that the living only dimly perceive. It has its own laws, its own currencies, its own invisible markets that trade in the most valuable commodity of all: suffering. I did not understand this when I was alive. I thought I was an agent, a strategist, a woman who had weaponized her pain for a cause she half-believed in. But the dead see differently. The dead see the flows of capital beneath the surface of events, the vast and intricate machinery that converts individual agony into collective profit. And what I see, when I look back at the months between the filing of Salazar v. Neely and the night of my death, is an economy that I did not create but that I fed with terrible efficiency.

Let me show you the numbers. The Valtorian Broadcast Network paid three hundred thousand lyras for the exclusive rights to my first post-filing interview. The Continental Journal syndicated the transcript to forty-seven international outlets, each paying a licensing fee that flowed back to the network and, in small percentages, to the Iron Lilies. My face appeared on the cover of sixteen magazines in a single month, each cover generating an average circulation increase of twenty-three percent. The hashtag #JusticeForLeda was used over eighty million times across the social platforms of the Republic, each use feeding the algorithms that served advertisements for cosmetics, for self-defense courses, for memoirs by other women who had survived what I had survived—or what I had claimed to survive. The total economic value generated by my suffering, conservatively estimated, exceeded twelve million lyras. I saw not a single coin of it directly. The Iron Lilies received a portion, funneled through anonymous donor accounts that Cassandra Voss managed with the precision of a hedge fund manager. The media conglomerates received the rest. And I? I received the sympathy, which is the currency of the dead.

But the economy of tears is not merely financial. It is emotional, psychological, spiritual. It trades in identities as much as in advertising slots. And the most valuable identity in this economy, the identity that commands the highest price and the most fervent devotion, is the Victim. Capital V. A permanent condition, not a temporary state. A brand, not a biography.

I learned this in the third month after the press conference, when I tried to write something that had nothing to do with Viktor Drakos.

It was a short story, a fictional piece set in the coastal town of Thalassa where I had spent my childhood summers. The protagonist was a girl of eleven, obsessed with the tide pools that appeared in the rocks at low tide, the tiny ecosystems of starfish and anemones that seemed to her like entire universes in miniature. The story was about wonder, about the peculiar clarity of childhood perception, about the moment when the tide returns and the pools are swallowed and the girl understands, for the first time, that all worlds are temporary.

I sent the story to my editor at the publishing house that had contracted my memoir. Her name was Elara Voss—no relation to Cassandra, though they shared a certain predatory efficiency—and she had been enthusiastic about the memoir, sending me emails full of exclamation points and phrases like “your voice is so necessary” and “the world needs your truth.” I expected a similar enthusiasm for the story. What I received, three days later, was a phone call.

“It’s beautiful,” Elara said, and I could hear the “but” in her voice before she spoke it. “But it’s not what the market expects from you. Readers want Leda Kostova, the woman who stood up to Viktor Drakos. They want the story of survival, of resistance, of justice. They don’t want starfish.”

“They don’t want me,” I said.

“They want the you they know,” she corrected. “There’s a difference. The memoir will sell because it fits the narrative. This story doesn’t fit. Maybe in a few years, when the case is settled, when the movement has moved on to other battles. But not now.”

I hung up and stared at my reflection in the dark screen of my phone. The woman looking back at me was gaunt, hollow-eyed, her hair unwashed for days. She did not look like a hero. She did not look like a warrior. She looked like a woman who was being slowly erased, her features fading like a photograph left too long in the sun.

The story about the starfish was not the only thing I tried to write in those months. There was a novel, half-finished, about a family of immigrants from the Helvetic Protectorate who had settled in the Lycian League and opened a restaurant that served neither Helvetic nor Lycian food but a hybrid cuisine that belonged to neither culture. There was an essay about the architecture of the Valtorian High Court, the way the white marble and the high windows and the imposing columns were designed not to inspire justice but to intimidate those who sought it. There was a poem about the color of the light in the Arsenali district at dawn, the way it turned the brick buildings into blocks of honey and gold.

None of them were published. None of them were even submitted. Every time I sat down to write, the public would appear in my mind like a jury of faceless critics. “Stick to what you know,” they seemed to say. “Stay in your lane,” the lane being a narrow corridor of trauma that I was no longer permitted to leave.

The Iron Lilies reinforced this imprisonment without ever acknowledging it. Cassandra called me weekly, her voice a low, measured instrument of control. She asked about my well-being, my mental health, my readiness for the next phase of the case. She never asked about my writing. She never asked about my life beyond the lawsuit. She was not interested in Leda Kostova the woman. She was interested in Leda Kostova the plaintiff, the plaintiff being a role I had been cast in and could not resign.

And then there were the letters. The letters were the hardest part. They arrived daily, sometimes hourly, delivered to my apartment by a postal service that seemed to have no other purpose than to ferry the emotions of strangers into my living room. Some were supportive, filled with lavender ink and quotations from poets I had never read. Some were threatening, filled with venom and misspellings and promises of violence that I forwarded to the police and then deleted from my memory. But the worst were the letters that came from women who had survived what I had survived—or what they believed I had survived—and who now looked to me as a beacon, a guide, a living proof that survival was possible.

“You saved my life,” one letter read. “I was going to end it, but then I saw you on television, and I thought: if she can survive, so can I. Please don’t ever stop fighting. Please don’t ever give up. You are the reason I’m still alive.”

I read that letter seven times. Each time, the words pressed deeper into my chest like the point of a knife. This woman—this stranger whose name I did not know and whose face I would never see—had tethered her survival to mine. She had made me responsible for her continued existence. And the weight of that responsibility was heavier than any burden I had ever carried, heavier than the memory of Viktor’s hands, heavier than the guilt of Anya Petrova’s ruined career, heavier than the ghost of my own integrity that I had buried in the garden of the Iron Lilies and covered with the soil of public adulation.

I did not save her life. That is the truth I must now confess, in this deposition that will never be read by any court. I did not save anyone. I used them, as I used everyone, as the economy of tears uses all of us who participate in it. I used their pain to fuel my revenge. I used their sympathy to insulate myself from doubt. I used their admiration to fill the void that Viktor had carved into my chest, the void that no amount of justice could ever fill because it was not, in the end, a void that he had created. It was a void that had always been there, waiting for someone to pour their own emptiness into it.

The third month became the fourth. The fourth became the fifth. The trial date was set for the following spring, a distant horizon that receded further with every procedural motion filed by Viktor’s legal team. He had hired a firm from the capital, a firm with marble offices and partners whose names appeared in the registries of every major court in the Republic. They filed motions to dismiss, motions to delay, motions to compel discovery of my medical records, my therapy notes, my correspondence with Maren Kallis. Each motion was a small death, a tiny erosion of the narrative I had so carefully constructed.

And the public, the hungry public that had once fed on my suffering with such enthusiasm, began to grow restless. The hashtag #JusticeForLeda fell out of the trending lists, replaced by newer scandals, fresher victims, more urgent causes. The interview requests dwindled. The speaking invitations tapered off. The Iron Lilies shifted their attention to a new case, a high-profile prosecution of a university professor in the Lycian League who had been accused of assaulting three of his graduate students. Cassandra still called, but her calls were shorter, her tone more perfunctory. I was no longer the center of the movement. I was a satellite, orbiting a sun that was already beginning to cool.

This is the part of the story that no one tells. The part where the victim outlives her usefulness. The part where the public, having consumed her pain, moves on to the next offering, leaving her alone in an apartment full of rotting bouquets and letters from strangers who have already forgotten her name. This is the part where the economy of tears reveals its true nature: it is not an economy of compassion. It is an economy of consumption. And the consumed, once they are emptied of their value, are discarded like the husks of insects that spiders leave in the corners of their webs.

I began to understand this in the fifth month, when I tried to leave my apartment and found that I could not. Not because the door was locked. Not because anyone was stopping me. But because the outside world had become a stage I could no longer perform upon. Every face I saw in the street was a face that might recognize me, might pity me, might demand something from me that I no longer had the capacity to give. Every camera was a potential photograph, every microphone a potential question, every stranger a potential judge.

I stayed in my apartment for seventeen days. I did not answer the phone. I did not read the letters. I did not turn on the television, because the television was full of faces that reminded me of my own, faces of women who were being celebrated for their courage, their resilience, their willingness to suffer publicly. I hated them. I hated them because they reminded me of what I had become. And I hated them because they were still alive, and I was already beginning to die.

The pill bottle was still on my bedside table. I had not touched it since the night of the failed recantation, but I had not thrown it away either. It sat there, the orange plastic glowing in the streetlight, a patient and unjudging companion. I talked to it sometimes, in the small hours before dawn, when the voices in my apartment grew too loud to ignore. I told it about Viktor. I told it about Cassandra. I told it about the woman whose letter I had read seven times, the woman who had said I saved her life. “I didn’t save her,” I told the pill bottle. “I can’t save anyone. I can’t even save myself.”

And the pill bottle, being a good listener, said nothing. It simply waited, as it had always waited, for the moment when I would be ready to complete the narrative that the public had written for me.

That moment came on a Tuesday evening, or perhaps a Wednesday. The days had begun to blur by then, the calendar dissolving into a single, unbroken present that stretched from the night in the Arsenali district to the night I would swallow the pills. I was sitting on my bed, my back against the headboard, my laptop open to a news feed that I had promised myself I would not read. And there, in the trending section, was a new hashtag. #LedaTheLiar.

I clicked on it, my finger moving before my mind could stop it. The hashtag had been started by a group of Viktor’s supporters, a small but vocal collective that had been gathering in the darker corners of the internet since the filing of the suit. They had compiled a dossier of my inconsistencies: the traffic camera discrepancy, the edited diary entries, the testimony of Anya Petrova that had been taken out of context. They had posted screenshots of my interviews, circled my contradictions in red, captioned them with phrases like “She can’t keep her story straight” and “The truth is coming out.”

The dossier was not accurate. It was not fair. It omitted the context that I had also omitted, the complications that made the truth so difficult to hold. But it was not entirely false, either. And that was the worst part. The lies I had told were wrapped around a kernel of real experience, a real violation, a real confusion that had never been resolved. The supporters of Viktor were exploiting that confusion, just as I had exploited the clarity that the public demanded.

I closed the laptop. I looked at the pill bottle. And I understood, with the terrible clarity of the damned, that there was no way out of the narrative I had built. If I defended myself against the hashtag, I would be feeding the controversy, extending the cycle, giving the public more to consume. If I ignored it, it would grow, the accusations becoming truth through sheer repetition. If I recanted—truly recanted, this time, with no script and no strategy—I would destroy the movement that had protected me, the women who had believed in me, the stranger who had said I saved her life.

I was trapped. Not by Viktor. Not by the Iron Lilies. Not even by the public. I was trapped by my own creation, the identity I had constructed with such care, the victimhood I had worn like a crown until it became a manacle.

And so I opened the pill bottle. I poured the capsules into my palm. Thirty of them, white and smooth, each one a tiny door to a darkness where the hashtags could not follow. I did not swallow them all at once. I took them one by one, like a rosary, each capsule a prayer to a god I did not believe in. “Forgive me,” I whispered to the empty room. “Forgive me for the lies. Forgive me for the truth. Forgive me for not knowing the difference anymore.”

The darkness came slowly, a tide returning to swallow the pools of my consciousness. And as it came, I heard the sound that I have described before, the sound that will haunt me for as long as ghosts are permitted to remember. It was the sound of the world mourning me before I was even cold. The sound of hashtags renewing. The sound of my name becoming immortal.

And then I was here, in this deposition, in this ghost-body, in this economy of tears that continues to trade in the currency of my suffering even now. The numbers keep climbing. The value keeps accruing. And I am no longer a participant. I am a commodity, frozen in the amber of public sympathy, forever valuable because I am forever dead.

But I have not finished my testimony. The next chapter is the hardest one. The chapter where I must tell you about the people who profited most from my death. The people who are still profiting, even as you read these words.

The prosecution rests. The defense is about to call a new witness. And her name is Cassandra Voss.