Julian held out for a while.

Men like him always believe, right up until the end, that cleverness will save them, that there is an angle, a technicality, a deal.

But the papers do not care how clever you are.

The papers say what they say.

In the end, facing a trial that could only go one way, he pled guilty rather than let twelve strangers hear the whole of it read aloud.

I think that was what he could not bear, in the end — not the prison, which he surely told himself he would survive and come back from, but the reading aloud.