The truth did the rest.”

Chapter 12 — The Verdict

The board did not need long.

When the evidence was laid in front of it — the footage, the payroll records, the messages, the other women’s statements — there was no version of events left in which Dalton Ridgemont was a good executive who had made a private error.

There was only the machine, and the machine’s parts, all of them pointing one way.

I was told afterward that he tried, even then, to argue his way out of it — that he sat in front of the board and delivered a version of the same speech he had given me, the distraught fiancée, the extortionate maid, the good man undone by a misunderstanding.