His entire life was built on a pristine public surface, on being seen as a certain kind of man, and his mother’s journals were a fifteen-year record of exactly what lay beneath that surface, written in her own hand, unanswerable.

To contest the trust was to guarantee that record would be read into history in open court.

He stared at me with a look of pure, undiluted venom, a man who had just calculated the cost of his own reputation and found it far too high, and he did not say another word.

He could not.

She had beaten him, from beyond her own grave, with nothing but the truth and a good attorney.

And I want to be careful, here, about what kind of victory that was, because it matters to me that it be understood correctly.