For as long as I had known George’s family, I had been one voice against three, and they had understood the power of that arithmetic instinctively.

When it was my word against George’s, that was even, a stalemate a clever man could exploit.

But it was never my word against George’s alone.

It was my word against George, and Teresa, and Fiona, three people who would always, reflexively, back one another, who could manufacture a consensus out of thin air simply by agreeing, loudly and in unison, on whatever version of events suited them.

Against that chorus, an individual truth-teller is nearly helpless, because human beings are built to believe the many over the one, to assume that where there is agreement there must be truth.