“I’m going to believe what I can verify.” It was not what she expected, and I saw it land, saw a flicker of real fear cross her face for the first time, because a man who intends to verify things is a very different problem than a man who can be managed with a story.

Her entire method, I would come to understand, depended on a particular assumption about how belief works, that people believe whoever is more powerful, more polished, more confident, more like themselves.

She had built everything on the certainty that when it came down to her word against a housekeeper’s, mine would follow the money and the status and the ring on her finger, the way she believed everyone’s always did.

What she had not accounted for was a person who did not want to decide between two words at all, who wanted, instead, to look at what could actually be shown to be true.