We are all raised to believe that the truth wins in the end — that if you are innocent, the facts will out, that reality is on the side of the honest.

And then some of us discover, the hard way, that this is not automatically so.

That a confident, well-funded, well-rehearsed falsehood can beat a true thing, sometimes for a very long time, sometimes forever, when the true thing is defended by an exhausted man alone.

David had learned that lesson at devastating cost.

By the time I found him, he no longer believed the truth would save him, because the truth had already failed to save him, repeatedly, in courtrooms, against people better prepared than he was.

His faith in the basic fairness of the world had been broken, and that is a specific and terrible kind of injury, distinct from the loss of the house or the company — the loss of the belief that being right matters.