“Because now you won’t have to prove any of it using only your own memory.” And that distinction landed in me with enormous weight, because for nine years, my own memory had been precisely the thing Brandon had worked hardest to make unreliable — had trained me, patiently, to trust his confident version of events over my own recollection, until I second-guessed things I had watched happen with my own eyes.

A recorder does not second-guess itself.

A recorder does not get talked out of what it heard.

For the first time in nine years, my account of my own life did not depend on my being believed.

Chapter 10 — Eleven Months Earlier

The whole thing had begun, eleven months before that dinner, with something as small and ordinary as a leaking roof.