I asked Mitch to explain what he meant.<\/p>\n
He looked at me as though I were missing something obvious.<\/p>\n
The recording, he insisted, only established that he had been near my vehicle.<\/p>\n
That was all he was willing to accept.<\/p>\n
Near it.<\/p>\n
I thought about that word.<\/p>\n
It was convenient.<\/p>\n
It took a person holding a key against somebody else's paint and turned him into somebody who happened to be standing nearby.<\/p>\n
A passerby.<\/p>\n
Nothing more.<\/p>\n
I wasn't going to accept that description.<\/p>\n
I reminded him what was visible in the footage.<\/p>\n
His hand.<\/p>\n
The key.<\/p>\n
The contact with the SUV.<\/p>\n
And the amount of time it continued.<\/p>\n
He pushed back again.<\/p>\n
He claimed nobody could know exactly what his hand was doing from where the camera had been positioned.<\/p>\n
I stared at him.<\/p>\n
There it was.<\/p>\n
His whole defense.<\/p>\n
He wasn't explaining what had happened.<\/p>\n
He was arguing that I couldn't establish it clearly enough.<\/p>\n
I had heard that kind of reasoning before.<\/p>\n
Not necessarily those exact words.<\/p>\n
But the approach was familiar.<\/p>\n
If there was any uncertainty at all, Mitch would stretch it as far as he could.<\/p>\n
He would keep talking until the original question disappeared.<\/p>\n
I didn't want another conversation like that.<\/p>\n
I wanted an answer.<\/p>\n
So I asked him to tell me what he had actually been doing.<\/p>\n
Not what the video might fail to establish.<\/p>\n
Not what someone else might think.<\/p>\n
What he had been doing.<\/p>\n
It was a simple question.<\/p>\n
He had been standing beside my SUV with a key.<\/p>\n
If there was an innocent explanation, he could give it.<\/p>\n
I waited.<\/p>\n
Mitch started to speak.<\/p>\n
Then he stopped.<\/p>\n
For the first time during our argument, he had no immediate answer.<\/p>\n
I noticed the silence.<\/p>\n
I noticed it because I was so used to hearing him talk.<\/p>\n
He could argue about almost anything.<\/p>\n
He could dispute a detail.<\/p>\n
Change the subject.<\/p>\n
Find a problem with somebody else's explanation.<\/p>\n
But now I had asked him to provide his own.<\/p>\n
And he couldn't.<\/p>\n
I didn't celebrate.<\/p>\n
I didn't feel triumphant.<\/p>\n
Mostly, I felt tired.<\/p>\n
The damage to my SUV was already done.<\/p>\n
A confession wouldn't restore the paint.<\/p>\n
An apology wouldn't undo those ninety seconds.<\/p>\n
But I had wanted to hear him acknowledge the truth.<\/p>\n
I had wanted that more than I realized.<\/p>\n
Instead, he stood there without an explanation.<\/p>\n
I looked at him and thought about the fifteen thousand dollars I had refused to give him.<\/p>\n
That refusal had been my decision.<\/p>\n
The damage had been his.<\/p>\n
Those were two separate things.<\/p>\n
I wasn't going to let him turn them into one excuse.<\/p>\n
And I wasn't going to apologize for saying no.<\/p>\n
I asked Mitch to explain what he meant. He looked at me as though I were missing something obvious. The recording, he insisted, only established that he had been near … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40597,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40581\/revisions\/40597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}