But I knew Vaughan, and I knew what he did with a confrontation.

He turned it into a fog.

He would have denied, then half-admitted, then wept, then somehow, forty minutes later, made it about how hard he’d been working and how unseen he felt, until I was the one apologizing for the tone of my accusation.

He had been doing a version of that to me for twelve years, and he was very, very good at it.

The only way to win against a man who can win any argument is to refuse to have the argument at all — to gather the truth somewhere he can’t fog it, get it in writing, in photographs, in numbers on a page, and then simply set it down where it speaks for itself.

That is why I went to the agency instead of the bedroom.