The moment I stopped agreeing — the moment I understood that the facts were the facts whether or not Christian’s machine could spin them — his threat lost its teeth.

He could say I was unstable.

He could not make me unstable, and more importantly, he could not make the evidence unstable: the file, the texts, the transfers, the recording, Dr.

Pratt’s honest evaluation.

Those things did not care how skillfully he framed them.

That is the great vulnerability of a man whose only weapon is the narrative: he is helpless against anything that is simply, verifiably true.

So I stopped trying to win the story, which was his home ground, and I went instead to the ground where he could not follow, the ground of documented fact, and I built my case there, brick by verifiable brick, until no amount of his authorship could bring it down.