He believed that no one would ever hear the words spoken on that mountain.

That was the load-bearing pillar of the entire crime.

The remoteness of the cliff, the timing during the blizzard, the confidence in the car afterward — all of it rested on the certainty that the things he and Gretchen said to each other, in the storm and in the SUV, would exist only in their own memories, deniable forever.

And it is a reasonable-seeming assumption; that is what makes it so dangerous.

People do terrible things in places they believe are private, and the belief in that privacy is precisely what frees them to do the terrible things.

Brandon was not undone by a witness who happened to be watching.