“It was her idea, all of it, I never wanted—”

“You thought I was powerless,” I said.

It was not a question, and I said it without heat, because it was simply the truest thing I knew about him.

“That was the whole plan.

You looked at me and you saw someone powerless, and you built everything on it.”

He looked, for a long moment, at the general, and the physicians, and the news cameras, and the attorneys arranged around me like a wall.