It is the vindication of your own mind, handed back to you, after years of being told you could not trust it.

I do not think people who have not lived inside a campaign of that kind can fully understand how much damage it does, or how deep, because the injury is not to your circumstances but to the instrument you use to perceive your circumstances at all.

For years, Roman had done to me the thing that is, I have come to believe, the most quietly devastating thing one person can do to another: he had made me doubt my own perception.

Not once, dramatically, but continuously, in a thousand small corrections, until the doubt became the water I swam in.