“Is this true?” “It is a lie,” Julian stammered, his voice cracking down the middle.

“He is making it up.

He has lost his mind, you can all see he has lost his mind.” But no one in that room was looking at Arthur as though he had lost his mind.

They were looking at Julian, and the room had reorganized itself in an instant around a single new fact, the way a room does when a hidden thing is suddenly made plain.

A moment before, the two attorneys had been Julian and Victoria’s; now, subtly, they were merely lawyers in a room where a crime had just been laid on the table, calculating their own distance from it.