Dalton believed that version.

His mother believed it.

It is worth explaining why they were wrong, because their certainty about who I was is precisely what undid them.

Before the nonprofit, I spent eight years as an employment attorney.

I was good at it — good in the specific, unglamorous way that matters in that field, which has nothing to do with speeches and everything to do with records: knowing which document proves which claim, knowing that a company’s own paperwork, properly demanded and preserved, will convict it more reliably than any witness.

I left the firm not because I failed at it but because I was tired of representing the institutions and wanted, for once, to represent the people they ground down.