I became clear.

I became a person who no longer wondered whether her own perceptions could be trusted, because she had trusted them on a ledge in a blizzard and they had been right, and being right about the worst thing imaginable burns away, permanently, a lifetime of being told you are imagining things.

Survival did that.

It did not make me cruel.

It made me impossible to talk out of the truth ever again.

And that, more than the trench coat or the recording or the dramatic open doors, is the real reason Brandon lost.