If I had surfaced quietly, and Brandon had been arrested quietly, in the weeks and months before any trial he would have gone to work on the story — the private lunches, the sympathetic phone calls, the careful suggestions that his poor traumatized wife had become confused and vindictive after her ordeal, that things were more complicated than they appeared, that a good man was being railroaded.

He was extraordinarily good at that work; I had watched him do it, on smaller scales, for nine years.

The public reckoning took that weapon away from him permanently.

Two hundred people heard his own recorded voice, at his victim’s funeral, pricing her life at fifty million dollars.

There is no lunch, no phone call, no clever reframing that survives that.

I did not choose the chapel to humiliate Brandon for my own satisfaction, though I will not pretend there was no satisfaction in it.