So he read my silence in that cell as surrender, because surrender was the only thing his map allowed for.

He mistook a woman gathering herself for a woman giving up.

It is the most common error of a certain kind of powerful man, and it is always fatal, and I have watched it undo others since from the safe side of a courtroom: they cannot lose to a motive they don’t possess, so they never see it coming.

He crouched in front of my cage and called me proud as though it were the end of me.

It was the beginning.