My parents had built their whole defense on the assumption that every voice against them could be discredited as biased, mine most of all.

They had not counted on a stranger.

They had not counted on the possibility that a man with no dog in the fight would stop his car in a dark alley, and give a dying woman his coat, and then stand up in a courtroom two years later and say, plainly, what he had seen.

The disinterested witness is the thing the powerful can never fully control, because you cannot buy off, or intimidate, or discredit a person who wants nothing from you.

Don Ernesto wanted nothing.