Revoked, permanently, with a finding entered on his record that will be visible in every state in the country for the rest of his life.

Detective Hayes told me — and he was there, and I was not — that Douglas Sinclair sat through his criminal sentencing without any visible reaction whatsoever, and that in the licensing hearing, which was a much smaller room with about nine people in it, he lost his composure completely.

Because the eleven years is something being done to him, and a man like that can live inside that, and can construct a story about a system that failed and a hysterical ex-wife and a police officer who overstepped.

The licence was the identity.

The licence was the thing that made every one of his explanations work for eleven years — I’m a physician, I know what that label says, everybody in medicine does it — and when they took it, they took the sentence he had been starting with his whole adult life.

I do not enjoy that.