That’s the thing about men like Robert Vance. They never fully understand the difference between authority and familiarity. He has sat in rooms like this for half his life—town board meetings, zoning disputes, permit appeals, budget hearings, ribbon cuttings, condemnation fights. He knows how to talk over people and call it leadership. He knows how to smile at a judge and insult a witness in the same breath. He knows how to build a truth that functions perfectly well as long as no one introduces evidence stronger than his confidence.
For thirty years he ran the county council in all but title. He decided which roads got resurfaced, which contractors got favored, whose kid got a summer job on the parks crew, which local family was “good people” and which one was quietly not. In his mind, that made him important in a way the law should respect automatically.
In his mind, I am still twelve years old and standing in the wrong boots in a muddy field.