And then a baby was born with a mark on his back, and the entire elaborate structure came down in an afternoon, because the one thing all those men had never been able to buy or threaten or bury was biology itself.

The body keeps its own records.

It had written the truth on my son’s skin before he drew a breath, and no settlement in Connecticut could reach it there.

There was something almost consoling in that, sitting in the wreckage.

All my life I had believed, vaguely, that the powerful get to write the story — that men with money and lawyers and reputations to protect can simply decide what is true and pay everyone else to agree.

And here was proof that they can’t, not all the way, not forever.