He had inverted the whole thing so completely that he was the victim and I was the aggressor, and — this was the part that told me he would never understand what had happened to him — he believed it.

Not as a legal strategy.

He actually believed it.

He had spent so long inside a world arranged entirely around his own convenience that another person’s suffering did not register to him as real weight; it registered only as an inconvenience to be managed, and its exposure only as an injustice done to him.

There was nothing to argue with there.

You cannot reason someone out of the center of their own universe.