What Phoebe Reed gave him back, slowly, over those months, was not just a legal strategy.

It was that belief.

She showed him that the truth does not win on its own, the way we are told as children, but that it can be made to win, if you are willing to do the patient, relentless work of documenting it, of bringing paper, of building the case brick by brick until the lie has nowhere left to stand.

The truth is not a force of nature that arrives on its own.

It is a structure that has to be built, deliberately, by people willing to do the work.

My son had believed the truth had abandoned him.