You and me.

Withdraw the complaints, call it off, and I’ll forgive all of it.”

“You’ll forgive me,” I said.

“You destroyed my life,” he said, “over one mistake.”

I let that sit for a moment, because it was such a perfect distillation of how he saw the world that it almost deserved a kind of respect.

In his account of events, a year and a half of building a machine to exploit and silence a vulnerable young woman was “one mistake,” and my act of documenting it was the destruction of a life.