They poured their greed and their cruelty into that room and sealed their own case, sentence by sentence — while my father nodded along, now and then, and said mildly, “Go on.

What else?” What none of them knew was that three cameras were recording every word from the ceiling, streaming it to the same secure cloud as everything else.

It was, I realized as I watched it happen, a thing they were completely incapable of not doing.

My father had not tricked them, not really.

He had simply given them a comfortable room, a glass of water, and an audience that appeared to be losing, and their own natures had done the rest.

People like Noreen and Craig cannot help themselves in front of what they believe is a beaten opponent; the cruelty is not a strategy they deploy, it is simply who they are when they think they’ve won, and they had spent so many years winning against me that they had no idea how to behave any other way.