I had spent my career believing that documentation was the most powerful tool the vulnerable have.

Watching those two women come forward because one case had finally been made loudly enough to reach them, I stopped thinking of it as a belief and started thinking of it as simply true.

Chapter 11 — Threaten, Bargain, Beg

Dalton called me, in those weeks, more times than I answered.

The calls moved through a predictable sequence, the same one I had watched a dozen powerful men move through when the ground finally opened under them.

First he threatened — reputations he would ruin, lawsuits he would file, the vague expensive machinery of a man used to being obeyed.