Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

Almost everything erodes: reputations, buildings, the certainty of whoever was loudest in the room. What actually happened does not. A fact can be buried, denied or forgotten for a generation and it stays exactly the same size, waiting, which is why concealment usually costs more than the original wrong.

That works as reassurance and as warning. If you are being honest and losing, patience is not naivety. And before you commit to a convenient version of events, remember you will have to keep that version standing, while the accurate one needs no maintenance at all.