That is what evidence does, properly gathered and properly presented.

It does not shout.

It simply changes where everyone in the room is standing.

And I want to be honest here about what I felt, watching a man’s guilt spread across his face in front of his own lawyer, because it was not what I might have expected.

I did not feel triumph.

I had every reason to hate Julian, this man who had tried to murder the person who had just saved my son, and yet what rose in me as I watched him unravel was not hatred and not glee but something closer to sorrow, and a kind of awe at the sheer waste of it.

Here was a man born with everything, health and wealth and a father who, whatever his coldness, had built an empire to leave him.