Yardley protected the district because that is what the district pays him to do.

And the sum of all that individual self-protection was a machine perfectly designed to grind up the one person who had refused to protect himself first.

Amanda had seen it a dozen times.

“They’re not evil, most of them,” she said, almost gently, when I said some of this out loud.

“That’s what makes it work.

Evil you can point a jury at.