The loudest people in a fight are usually the ones building the case against themselves.

There is a discipline to silence that took me years to learn and that served me better here than any clever reply could have.

The instinct, when a crowd is lying about you, is to correct the record — to post the X-rays, to explain, to make them see.

It never works.

A defense is just fuel; it turns one lie into a thread of two hundred, and it drags you down to their level, where the loudest voice wins and the truth is beside the point.

So I said nothing, and let the noise be theirs alone, and trusted the two rooms Dorothea had built.