The truth is that it was the hardest performance of my life, and also that I had been rehearsing for it for eight years without knowing it.

I was already an expert at making myself smaller than I was in that house.

I simply pointed the skill in a new direction.

The wife who had learned not to correct him at dinner, who had learned to swallow her own competence to protect his ego — that woman turned out to be perfectly built for the job of sitting still and watching a man convict himself.

Every humiliation I had absorbed over the years had, without my ever intending it, trained me for exactly this.

He had spent eight years teaching me to hide what I knew.

I used the last six months of it to hide that I knew everything.

There were nights it nearly broke me.

Nights I wanted to throw the folder on the table and end it, out of sheer exhaustion with the deception.

What stopped me was simple: a confrontation would have felt good for an evening and cost me the case.