He believed that winning meant the grand gesture, the cutting remark, the public humiliation of your enemy, the smirk delivered at exactly the right moment.

He had built his whole encounter with me that night around a single theatrical line, saved and polished for years.

And it had accomplished nothing, because the best consequences in this world do not need theatrics.

They do not need a perfect speech, or a dramatic confrontation, or a witness.

They need only one thing, the most unglamorous thing there is, the thing I had spent my mocked and underestimated career mastering: documentation.

Marcus brought a sentence to that wedding.