I almost felt for Ainsley Bracken in that moment, watching him invoke privilege for a conversation in which he had coached his clients to fabricate a mother’s dementia.

Almost.

He was, I think, the only person in that room who fully understood, the instant his own voice came through the speaker, that everything was over — not just the case, but his career, his license, the whole edifice of a professional life.

Sheldon and Blanche still had the dazed look of people who did not quite grasp how completely they had lost.

Ainsley grasped it at once.

He was a lawyer; he could read the room the way I read a ledger.