My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

I have heard better and I have heard much worse. It was competent and it was confident and it was built entirely out of things my parents had told him over three months.

I did not interrupt once.

That is not restraint, incidentally. It is training and it is entirely mechanical.

You do not interrupt because every interruption tells the other side which sentence hurt, and because a judge is watching two people and forming a view about both of them, and because a woman who sits still while she is described is a much harder thing to explain away than a woman who objects.

I sat there for nineteen minutes with my hands on two folders and let a man tell a courtroom I was unstable.