He was certain the house was his, so he never checked the deed.

He was certain I was emotional and beaten, so he never considered that I might act.

He was certain his family’s power over me was permanent, so he flew to Maui without a backward glance.

At every turn, his downfall was not a lack of intelligence but an excess of unexamined certainty — the arrogance of a man so sure he understood his world that he never bothered to verify a single assumption underlying it.

And I have come to believe that this is how arrogant people almost always fall: not because they are stupid, but because their certainty makes them incurious, and their incuriosity makes them blind to the specific facts that would have saved them.