Roman understood it.

They had cast the whole thing like a play — the tender grieving lovers, the jealous frigid wife — and they had cast me in the one role guaranteed to lose, and my own dignity had walked me straight into it.

I learned, at the cost of two years, a lesson I have never since forgotten: that being right is not the same as being believed, and that the truth, on its own, unprotected, unperformed, undocumented, will lose to a good enough lie every time.

It was the last time I ever let the truth go into a room undefended.