Defending his reputation would have required him to lie about what had actually happened, and even Andrew could not find a lie large enough to cover it.

I felt no triumph, reading that silence.

What I felt was something quieter and stranger: the recognition that I had spent two years trying to earn the approval of a man who, faced with the plain public truth of his conduct, had no defense he could speak aloud.

There is a particular freedom in that — in realizing that the person whose good opinion you once bent yourself out of shape to keep cannot, when it matters, even defend himself with the truth.

I put the phone down and did not pick it back up for him ever again.