Not only by taking his house and his company, but by constructing a reality in which his suffering was proof of his guilt, so that the very evidence of what was being done to him became indistinguishable, even to him, from evidence of what was wrong with him.

You cannot argue your way out of a trap like that.

The only way out is from the outside — someone who was not inside the manufactured reality, walking up to a fogged car window and refusing to accept the story.

That is the one thing the whole beautiful machine could not account for.

It had never planned for a father to show up.

Chapter 8 — Why Didn’t You Call