And she told me that I had not failed to see it — that the entire architecture of what Sennett did was built precisely to be unseeable, that a con this total does not survive contact with an ordinary skeptical mind unless the mind has been chemically dismantled first, which mine had been.

“You didn’t miss the signs because you were foolish,” she said.

“You missed them because a great deal of money and a great deal of effort went into making sure you would.

And the moment the fog thinned even slightly — one glance at an imprint on a pill — you saw everything, instantly, and you moved.

That is not the mind of a woman who can’t trust her own judgment.

That is the mind of a woman whose judgment was the single most dangerous thing in the room, which is exactly why they had to drug it.” It took me months to believe her.