What she learned from that — and it is the thing she now says to nursing students in the last ten minutes of her lecture, and the reason she is invited back — is that people do not resist an accusation because they believe the accused.

They resist it because of what it would cost them to believe the accuser.

“If Nathan Brooks strangled his wife,” she tells them, “then eleven people in that chapel had eaten dinner at his table.

Then a doctor signed something he shouldn’t have.

Then a county office spent eleven minutes.

Then every single person who ever thought he’s so protective of her has to go back and look at that thought again.