But there is a difference between knowing a thing on paper and knowing it in the body, and after twelve years I needed the second kind.

I needed to sit in the same row and hear him lie in real time — hear the practiced ease of it, watch him do to a stranger what he had done to me a thousand times — so that no part of me could ever again wonder whether I had judged him too harshly, whether I had thrown away something that might have been saved.

I came to burn out the last root of my own doubt.

And by the time the plane reached the runway, it was gone, and it has never grown back.

Vaughan’s face changed then, the charm dropping clean off it.

“Dagny.