He pled not guilty and went to trial, which surprised everybody including his own attorneys, and I have come to believe he did it because he genuinely believed he could talk his way through it, because he had talked his way through everything since he was about nineteen.

The trial took nine days.

I testified on the third and fourth and I was on the stand for about five hours in total.

The cross-examination was conducted by a very good lawyer named Frank Demopoulos who was courteous to me throughout and whose entire strategy, correctly, was that I was mistaken rather than lying.

He put it to me that I had seen a flashlight and not a syringe, and I agreed.

He put it to me that I had been under strain, that I had not been sleeping, that I had lost weight, that my father’s death had hit me hard — and I agreed with all of it, because every word was true, and because Deirdre Halloran had spent two hours teaching me that the only way through that particular attack is to concede everything that is true and refuse everything that is not.