George didn’t gloat. He lowered the phone and looked at his son with something heavier than anger.

“When you went off to law school,” George said quietly, “I told you the law was a tool, and a tool can build a house or it can tear one down. You get to choose which. I remember telling you that.” He paused. “Look at what you chose.”

Claire watched Jason absorb it, and she understood that of everything that had happened in that room, this was the blow that actually reached him.

Not her evidence — evidence was just a professional problem to a man like Jason, a thing to be outmaneuvered.

What reached him was his father, whom he had spent a year lying to every Sunday over the phone, standing in a shabby apartment holding a receipt that proved the lie, and choosing to sound disappointed rather than furious.

Jason could have withstood fury.