There were long, dull, careful afternoons in a small office, laying out a private investigator’s file, walking a detective through eight years of documents, giving a formal statement, watching her make her methodical notes and ask her methodical questions.

It was the least cinematic thing imaginable, and it was everything.

Because Arthur’s whole life had trained him to win the dramatic moments — the confrontation in the doorway, the tearful denial, the charming reversal in front of the family.

Those were his home ground; he had never lost one.

What he had no defense against was process — the slow, unglamorous accumulation of a case by people whose good opinion he could not court and whose procedures his charm could not bend.

While Arthur was preparing to win one more living-room performance, Detective Delgado was quietly building something that did not care about performances at all: a file, a timeline, a set of charges that would still be true in the cold light of a courtroom weeks later, when his tears had dried and his charm had nowhere left to work.