And it would have felt, for about ten seconds, magnificent.

I chose not to, and not out of mercy — I owed him no mercy — but out of strategy and out of self-respect, which in this case turned out to be the same thing.

The moment I introduced the affair, the whole story would have changed shape in that room.

It would have become a story about a wronged wife’s fury, and the sympathy would have gotten complicated, and Lucan’s lawyers would have had something to work with: she was emotional, she was vengeful, she used private marital matters to settle a score. By keeping it to the numbers — the invoices, the approvals, the federal contracts, the fraud — I gave him nothing to push against.

There was no emotion in it to discredit.

There was only what he had done, laid out in columns, verifiable and cold.