It had not once occurred to him, even then, even bloodshot on my sister’s porch, that the problem was never the absence of proof of my innocence.

The problem was that he had required proof at all.

A man who trusts his wife does not need to read a lab report five times to believe her.

He needs to read it zero times, because he never doubted her in the first place.

Matthias thought he had come to apologize for being wrong.

He did not yet understand that being wrong was the smallest part of it — that a man can be factually corrected and still be, at the root, exactly the same man who condemned you.