“And the only way I got it back was by insisting on what was true — documenting it, proving it, refusing to look away from it, no matter how much it cost.

I’m not going to win my mind back by then lying about everything else.

The truth is the only ground I have left to stand on.

I’m not giving up an inch of it, not even the parts that hurt me.” She looked at me for a moment, and then she nodded, and I understood that in her long career of watching money make people ugly, she did not hear that particular answer very often.

It became the spine of everything that followed: not my cleverness, not my leverage, but the simple, unglamorous decision to be the one person in the entire affair who told the whole truth and kept telling it, all the way down to the bottom.

Chapter 17 — The Raids