I did not engineer that.

I want to be clear about it, because it is almost too neat to believe.

I only declined to protect him from himself, and he did the rest, methodically, with his own two hands, convinced the entire time that he was winning.

There is an old idea that the wicked dig their own pit and fall into it.

I used to think it was a comforting fiction.

I watched it happen, over three months, in real time, to a man who could not stop digging even as the walls came down around him.