That is how you make a person believe an impossible thing: you don’t argue it once, you arrange for it to be confirmed again and again by people wearing white coats, until doubting it feels like doubting the whole world.

I had not been fooled by a single liar.

I had been walked, carefully, through a building full of them.

“You investigated him?”

“I used to investigate a great many people.”

That was the moment I understood something that reshaped everything after it.