Chapter 12 Witness X
Witness X
Knowledge Is Power
“The reason con artists get away with everything they do is because they’re good at finding people’s weaknesses.”
He’d know.
My dad was charming and charismatic. Men wanted to be his friend and women wanted to sleep with him.
None of this had anything to do with his status in society; most of the people he manipulated knew nothing about him or what he did for a living.
But he always seemed to know what people wanted, what they needed to hear.
Dad was an incredible listener. He studied people and wore different masks depending on who he spoke to.
A chameleon. I was the only one who saw the real him.
“The only way to protect yourself from people is to gather information to hurt them with later on. If you don’t do this, they’ll strike first.”
Everybody has an emotional wound, he’d tell me, and once people know what that weakness is, they can use it to destroy you.
Or you can use it to destroy them.
Take Jack, for example. He wouldn’t have done what he did if he had protected his weaknesses a bit better. Then there’s Anton—his weakness was more complicated. More conflicted. He paid the ultimate price for it in the end.
Neither would have ended up where they are now if they’d been more guarded. More careful.
I honestly walk away from some men and women—people I’ve met at parties for all of fifteen minutes, airing their childhood trauma—and think, “Do you know how easy it would be for someone to hurt you?” What do they expect, if they make themselves vulnerable to strangers?
That’s the key: once people start talking to someone who is willing to listen, they’ll reveal anything. We all want to be heard, even if we give away our own secrets. Beware people accusing you of something; it’s very likely they’re doing it themselves. Projection is powerful.
Dad used to ask me to give him obscure challenges: get personal, financial, or childhood details from strangers, and he always managed it.
He found out their imaginary friends as a kid, bank account details—he even once got a woman to give him ￡600 in the space of twenty minutes.
It was a sport to him. And Dad was right. Everyone has a wound, even me.
Especially me.
How I managed to reach adulthood without becoming an alcoholic, a drug addict, or killing myself was purely down to my determination to be nothing like him in the end.
That has always been my biggest fear.
And so, when someone or something threatens what I’ve worked so hard for, I cannot look the other way.
Because I escaped that life, that wretched life drenched in constant fear.
It’s the smaller, subtler things I’m now fiercely protective of, like feeling safe when I turn the light off before I go to sleep.
The knowledge that my bedroom door won’t be opened in the middle of the night.
Recognizing that my body is my own and I now get a say in who touches it.
The things I had to do to get here, you’d be horrified to know. I learned the tools I needed to escape, and I used them.
Find the weaknesses in people and then exploit them. That’s where your power is.