Not because screaming was unreasonable, given what I thought I was reading, but because of what it revealed about the speed with which I was willing to believe the worst of a good man on the strength of a single page.

I had five years of evidence about who Gabriel was.

Five years of Tuesday flowers and Disney movies and a sister who woke up happy every single day in a yellow house.

And a single sheet of paper, read in a panic under a buzzing light, was enough to make me throw all five years of that evidence aside in an instant and scream betrayal at him.

There is a lesson in that, one I have carried carefully ever since: that a document, a piece of official-looking paper, has a terrible power to override everything we know from lived experience, to make us doubt the testimony of years on the strength of a single stark artifact.